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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



CONTEMPORARY MEN 
OF LETTERS SERIES 

EDITKD BY 
WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 



CHARLES DUDLEY 
WARNER 

BY Mrs. JAMES T. FIELDS 



Contemporary 




i3 ; 3'. ■•>'"■•■ 



NEW YORK 

McCLURE, PHILLIPS ^ CO. 

MCMIV 



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LIBR^«V «t CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

MAR 22 1904 

, Cepyright Entiy 






COPY 8 



>^ 



Copyright, 1904, by 
McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. 



Published, March, 1904, N 



? CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 



Charles Dudley Warner was distinctively 
a man of his own day. He was enlisted 
for the men and women who made his 
world. He knew the past, for he was a 
man of letters; the future he did not 
know; he was content to leave that to the 
Father of us all; the present was his field. 
Warner's acceptation of the present and 
the way he lived for it was a peculiar and 
distinguishing gift. Planting his feet 
firmly on the knowledge he never ceased 
to acquire, he was ready to speak at call 
before any assembly when he was invited, 
or to hold his part in any conversation. 
Never dull, never insistent, but grace- 
fully, helpfully, joyously furthering the 
[3] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

ends of any interesting occasion whatever 
it might be. The generosity of his na- 
ture and a certain self-possession enabled 
him to be profoundly social. There was 
no day, no hour, no moment, no thing 
which he would not give, if he could, to a 
fellow-mortal who needed his presence or 
his help. That the demand was import- 
ant to some one else made it important 
enough for him to consider. This wide 
sympathy fitted him to be what he became 
— a newspaper editor of distinction, a 
writer of many books, primarily for his 
contemporaries, but so well done that some 
of his pubhshed work will live beyond his 
time. 

He could say "no" with the best, yet it 
would be after considering if he might not 
[4] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

say "yes.'' His large sympathy made 
him a large man among his fellows. He 
pursued his ends without let or hindrance, 
being concentrated on the manner of 
working which was natural to him. The 
final means not only of his progress, but 
of all real progress, he believed to be 
literature, or the power of making perma- 
nent what is worthy. 

His first book, when a mere boy, was a 
compilation called "A Book of Eloquence 
for Students.'' His second was pub- 
lished quite twenty years later, a delight- 
ful and amusing home picture called ''My 
Summer in a Garden" ; but before, behind, 
and beyond the yearly books which ensued 
upon the success of his ''Garden" was 
the never-ceasing flow of newspaper and 
[5] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

magazine writing, wherein he was steadily 
using the power that was his for the pub- 
lic good. 

Charles Dudley Warner was born in 
Plainfield, Massachusetts, September 12, 
1829, a country boy without wealth or spe- 
cial opportunity. His opportunity was 
always his own brain, his own heart, his 
own steady-growing virtue. His father 
died a young man, thirty-six years old, and 
when Charles was only five; there was a 
brother George, one year old, and these 
two little boys, with their mother, who 
came from Cazenovia, New York, lived 
for three lonely years on their cold up- 
land farm of two hundred acres, "blown 
by wind and beaten by shower," and 
[6] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

nearly buried by the snows of winter. 
For the farm was the only inheritance 
of Charles's father, whose brother and 
sisters each and all went westward, leav- 
ing the land to him, Justus by name, to 
do what he could with the unreward- 
ing soil. Plainfield was not a town to 
be judged by the standards of some 
country towns to-day; that and Cum- 
mington, its neighbor, where William 
CuUen Bryant was born ; Ashfield, doubt- 
less, and many another township of that 
part of New England, were settled by de- 
scendants of the Mayflower immigrants, 
or from the colony which moved to Hart- 
ford from Cambridge in 1636, under their 
leader, Thomas Hooker, and afterward 
left Connecticut for a less-restricted re- 
[7] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

ligious atmosphere. Warner's paternal 
ancestor was one of the Connecticut col- 
ony who seceded, probably with compan- 
ions, and came northward. He must 
have been pathetically ignorant of New 
England hill-country climate to have 
bought a farm 2,200 feet above the sea 
upon which to support a family and 
bequeath its storms and its stones to 
his descendants forever. But the land 
may have been allotted, as was some- 
times done in those early days, to desira- 
ble settlers. 

Warner's mother descended from one 
of the voyagers in the Mayflower, Cooke, 
whose name is duly inscribed in the 
Plymouth records. Her people came 
first to live in a town adjacent to Plain- 
[8] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

field, Hawley, and removed to Cazenovia 
while Charles's mother was a little girl. 
It was natural enough that affectionate 
connections once made between the two 
families should have grown stronger 
rather than weaker upon the removal 
of one of the families to Cazenovia. 
Certain it is that Justus Warner went 
thither to seek his wife Sylvia (Rus- 
sell Hitchcock), and to bring her back 
to the familiar vicinity from which her 
parents' removal seemed to have trans- 
planted her; but the "little god" is ever at 
his work, and Charles was to be born in 
Plainfield, one mile from the old church 
of his parents and grandparents. Doubt- 
less at the sad moment of her young hus- 
band's death the little boy Charles often 
[9] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

seemed to his mother "a great help," but 
at the age of five this help must naturally 
be taken in a moral sense. The labour on 
the farm must be performed by hired 
men; and while he was a cheerful, loving, 
intelligent child and a joy to his mother's 
heart, the burdens of unusual business and 
unremunerative farming must often have 
weighed upon her mind. We cannot 
doubt that her boy continually surprised 
her by his sympathetic insight and clever- 
ness, but five years have their limitations. 
She went on bravely, wishing to keep her 
children with her, imitil Charles was eight 
years old and his brother four, then, yield- 
ing to the kind suggestions of relatives 
and friends, she left her home forever. 
In the town of Charlemont, eight miles 
[10] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
from Plainfield, on the Deerfield River, 
lived an intelligent man, a farmer, Jonas 
Patch by name, a connection of the family 
who was willing to become Charles's 
guardian. It was a necessity that the 
boy should now go to school and begin 
a new life. The reasons for the change 
were sufficient, the farm was sold and a 
share of the money that came from it was 
carefully husbanded for Charles's educa- 
tion, because his father's latest words were 
that "Charles must go to college." 

Plainfield was not a place of ordinary 
farming people, as we have already inti- 
mated. The minister of the old Presby- 
terian church, Parson Hallock, was a man 
of intellect and learning and set the pace. 
Justus Warner, and his father before him, 
[11] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

owned and read good books, and the peo- 
ple met and talked together as did the 
people described by Mrs. Stowe. Charles 
had always found standard English books 
on shelves where he could reach them; 
there was a fine portrait of his father 
painted in Boston by a good artist, "in a 
dress which seemed elegant," hanging on 
the walls. His father was evidently a 
man of knowledge and promise. Thus 
his mother's happy associations belonged 
to Plainfield, all her young hopes and am- 
bitions of early married life were centred 
there, and, in leaving Plainfield for 
Charlemont, she left everything that was 
dear to her except her boys, and upon 
them her life, she felt, should now be con- 
centrated. 

[12] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

On arriving at Charlemont, Jonas 
Patch, a man "of excellent standing and 
influence in the community," gladly re- 
ceived the oldest boy and brought the best 
possible influences to bear upon him. 
Many years after Charles's first literary 
successes and travels abroad, in his ma- 
turity, it seems to have occurred to him 
how good it might be for future boys and 
future guardians, as well as how amusing 
for the world in general, to read a boy's 
true experiences between the ages of eight 
and twelve, on a New England farm. 
The integrity of his character gave him 
the very rare power of telling the exact 
truth regarding his own life. The books 
of Warner are real autobiography. 
Whatever the subject may be of which he 
[13] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

treats, it is his own experience of that sub- 
ject. His life was not eventful, in the 
usual meaning of that term, but he lived 
and felt genuinely always, could and 
would speak the truth, and enjoyed every 
hour like a true Christian. 

In 1877 he published ''Being a Boy," a 
book giving a delightful picture of his ex- 
periences on Jonas Patch's farm. He 
says: "The riu-al hfe described is that of 
New England between 1830 and 1850, in 
a period of darkness before the use of 
lucif er matches. ... I invented noth- 
ing — ^not an adventure, not a scene, not an 
emotion. I know from observation how 
difficult it is for an adult to write about 
childhood. Invention is apt to supply de- 
tails that memory does not carry." Not 
[14] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

with Warner when he undertakes to tell a 
true story ! Here we have an unvarnished 
picture of the boy, "the father of the 



man." 



''One of the best things in the world to 
be is a boy," he says; ''it requires no ex- 
perience, though it needs some practice to 
be a good one. . . . The proudest day 
of my life was one day when I rode on the 
neap of the cart, and drove the oxen all 
alone, with a load of apples, to the cider 
mill. I was so little that it was a wonder 
that I did not fall off and get under the 
broad wheels. Nothing could make a 
boy, who cared anything for his appear- 
ance, feel flatter than to be run over by 
the broad tire of a cart-wheel. But I 
never heard of one who was, and I don't 
[15] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
believe one ever will be. . . . There are 
so many bright spots in the life of a farm- 
boy that I sometimes think I should like 
to live the life over again ; I should be al- 
most willing to be a girl if it were not for 
the chores. • . . I have often thought 
it fortunate that the amount of noise in a 
boy does not increase in proportion to his 
age ; if it did the world could not contain 
it " 

He runs on in this pleasant way, be- 
traying his own nature at every point. 
Once he reminds us of Richard Brinsley 
Sheridan, whose wit held London on the 
alert, yet wrote: "Sit still, think, and do 
nothing." Warner says: "A boy can 
stand on one leg as well as a Holland 
stork. . • . If he had his way, he would 
[16] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

do nothing in a hurry ; he likes to stop and 
think about things, and enjoy his work as 
he goes along." 

Meanwhile the years were slipping 
away and the time approaching when an- 
other school must be found for a boy 
whose tastes were proved to be distinctly 
scholarly. ''He tells at home that he has 
seen the most wonderful book that ever 
was, and a big boy has promised to lend 
it to him. 'Is it a true book, John?' asked 
the grandmother ; 'because if it isn't true, 
it is the worst thing that a boy can read.' 
. • . John cannot answer as to the truth 
of the book, and so does not bring it into 
the house, but he borrows it, nevertheless, 
and conceals it in the barn, and, lying in 
the hay-mow, is lost in its enchantments 
[17] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

many an odd hour when he is supposed to 
be doing chores. There were no chores in 
the 'Arabian Nights'; the boy there had 
but to rub the ring and summon a genie 
who would feed the calves and pick up 
chips and bring in wood in a minute. It 
was through this emblazoned portal that 
the boy walked into the world of books, 
which he soon found was larger than his 
own, and filled with people he longed to 
know." 

When Charles was twelve came the 
next important step in his life. His 
mother's brother, in Cazenovia, took the 
family back to that pleasant town, where 
Charles was soon placed in the Methodist 
Seminary, a school of note in that part 
of the country. He did not become a 
[18] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
Methodist — ^his family were all Presby- 
terians — and possibly he did not give 
much thought to the subject. In later 
years he liked to go to the Episcopal 
Church, especially that of Dr. Rainsf ord 
in New York; when in Hartford his 
friendship for Mr. Twichell would not 
allow him to think of going elsewhere 
than to Mr. Twichell's church. It was 
not long before he was talked of as the 
first boy in his class, and on commence- 
ment day he carried oif the chief prize. 
The "Oneida Conference Seminary," for 
such it was called, was a co-educational 
school, and it is probable that a certain 
power which he possessed, peculiarly, of 
making friendship with women and en- 
joying their society in what would seem a 
[19] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

perfectly natural way (if it were oftener 
seen in the world), may have been ac- 
quired there. It was on the graduating 
day of his class when it was noised abroad 
that a handsome lad, Warner, was to 
make the prize address, that he was first 
seen by a little girl, Susan Lee, whom he 
afterward married. 

Meantime Charles kept steadily at 
other work beside his books — else the 
small patrimony might not have held 
out for college. He associated him- 
self with the printing office of the local 
paper ; then he went into a book-store ; and 
finally served in the post-office as a clerk. 
He must have been studying all the time, 
for when he found himself able to go to 
college he entered as sophomore at Ham- 
[20] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

ilton, in the town of Clinton. Thence he 
graduated with a reputation for literary 
acquirements in 1851. One other experi- 
ence was his in the way of education, prob- 
ably preceding the glorious days of the 
seminary. He had an aunt who was a 
Quaker, who lived in the town of De Ruy- 
ter, where there was a school of very high 
repute. Charles was invited by this aunt 
to make her a long visit and attend the 
De Ruyter school. It was an invitation 
not to be resisted. 

Here Charles evidently enjoyed him- 
self a great deal, one of his chief pleasures 
being that of finding his lifelong friend^ 
a boy at the same school, Wirt Dexter. 
When, after this, and the college days at 
Hamilton being ended (he entered Ham- 
[21] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

ilton at nineteen) , he found himself a man 
of twenty-one, with the problem still mi- 
settled, the problem which confronts every 
yoimg man: "What shall I do with my 
talents, which way shall I turn?'' With 
some men, especially if they are to be 
artists of any kind, with pen or pencil, 
this season may be lingering and painful, 
but Warner, having no one but himself to 
lean upon and being confirmed in his de- 
sire to study law, needed only to settle 
with himself as to ways and means to this 
end. Whatever he might one day accom- 
plish in the field of letters, he knew there 
was no possibility of maintaining himself 
properly at first in this career, beside he 
needed the equipment of the law, the defi- 
nite knowledge which a profession brings. 
[22] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

Unhappily at this juncture his health 
failed, but he secured a position in an en- 
gineering corps surveying for railroads in 
the State of Missouri. Two years in the 
open restored him entirely. His clear 
blue eyes and his fresh complexion took 
on their wonted look of health once more, 
and receiving an invitation at this junc- 
ture from one of his college friends in 
Philadelphia, Charles went there at once 
to look about him. The grandfather of 
this friend was a conveyancer, and urged 
Charles to begin his studies in law 
straightway, and come as soon as possi- 
ble into his office. 

Young Warner applied himself to the 
work with unremitting energy, encour- 
aged and helped on by his generous 
[ 23 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

friends, and the day he began to practice 
he married Susan Lee. Their marriage 
took place in the year 1856. He studied 
law faithfully, but the practice of the pro- 
fession never agreed with him. He found 
it very harassing. He did not think of 
settling in Chicago, but later while on 
a journey another college friend per- 
suaded him to go into business there with 
him, and the sign Davenport & Warner 
was very soon put up. He took a mod- 
est house, furnished it with the great- 
est simplicity and taste, and here his 
delightful home life began. He had 
a few friends in Chicago to start with, 
Wirt Dexter among others, and proba- 
bly the most intimate. Unhappily the 
hard times of 1856, 1857, and 1858 are 
[24] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

still rememberable, and Warner did not 
immediately succeed to his liking in those 
days of peculiar difficulty for young pro- 
fessional men. 



[25] 



II 

At this time one of his Eastern friends, 
Mr. Joseph R. Hawley, had become the 
editor of a Republican paper just started 
in Hartford, Conn., The Press. He 
wished Charles Warner to assist him in 
the editorship, and went to Chicago to try 
to induce him to return to the East and to 
live in Hartford. Small time was lost in 
coming to a decision, but what could they 
do with the pleasant house? At that mo- 
ment Wirt Dexter determined to marry 
and wanted a place to live. The lease 
was assumed by him, but how about the 
furnishings? ''Oh," said Warner, "I paid 
just so many hundred dollars for every- 
thing in this house, and you shall have it 
[261 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

all for that if you will." The money was 
paid, the Warners went to Hartford ; the 
following year General Hawley was 
called to the war and Warner took the sole 
editorship of The Evening Press. He 
would have gone to the war himself ex- 
cept for his extreme short-sightedness, 
which forced him to stay at home and 
serve the country by his pen. This 
sel^vice he never quitted. After the war 
he and his friend were able to buy the 
Hartford Courant, and consolidate the 
two papers, making a powerful journal 
which has always held its own and some- 
thing more. It would be deeply interest- 
ing to follow his war papers from day to 
day, but we can only refer to them here. 
One summer when the hearts of men were 
[27] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

very low Warner said: "Look here, this 
will never do ; suppose I write a few edito- 
rials during these weeks of August which 
shall give people something to laugh about 
and something to think about that is cheer- 
ful? He went to his desk and every 
week printed one of the editorials after- 
ward put together in the book called ''My 
Summer in a Garden," and published b}^ 
Fields & Osgood in 1870. Henry Ward 
Beecher wrote an introductory letter say- 
ing: ''In our feverish days, it is a sign of 
health or of convalescence that men love 
gentle pleasure. . . . The love of rural 
life, the habit of finding enjoyment in 
familiar things ... is worth a thou- 
sand fortunes of money or its equivalent." 
The editorials, and later the book, 
[28] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
gained at once a happy fame. The fruit 
of this garden was unexpected. Many a 
heart was soothed and stimulated by it. 
The influence upon the writer was no less 
wholesome. He returns to his boyish 
habits: "I like to go into the garden/' he 
says, "these warm latter days and muse. 
To muse is to sit in the sun and not think 
of anything!" The wit and humour of 
the pages are exquisite, and so are the de- 
lightful glimpses of home-life, which with 
him never lost its savour. Polly and he 
understood one another too well to be dis- 
turbed by shafts of fun launched at each 
other's expense. ''What might have be- 
come of the garden, if Polty's advice had 
been followed, a good Providence only 
knows; but I never worked there without 
[29] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

a consciousness that she might at any mo- 
ment come down the walk, mider the 
grape-arbour, bestowing glances of ap- 
proval, that were none the worse for not 
being critical. ... It was this bright 
presence that filled the garden, as it did 
the summer, with light." . . . 

The combination of work and play to 
be foimd in his garden, as in every true 
garden, fills the reader with sympathetic 
pleasure. "Hoeing on a bright soft May 
day, when you are not obliged to, is nearly 
equal to the delight of going trouting." 
His fun about weeding seems truly im- 
mortal. "Pusley" received its death- 
blow in spite of a letter entreating him to 
pause because a certain lady's husband 
had been so inflamed with zeal that in her 
[30] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

absence "he had rooted up all her beds 
of portulaca (a sort of cousin of the pot 
weed), and utterly cast it out." The 
table of the garden's profit and loss is very- 
amusing. He says: "I have tried to make 
the table so as to satisfy the income-tax 
collector. • . . I have had some diffi- 
culty in fixing the rate of my own wages. 
It was the first time that I had an oppor- 
tunity of paying what I thought labour 
was worth. ... I figured it right 
down to European prices, seventeen cents 
a day for unskilled labour. Of course, I 
boarded myself." 

The years of our great war were stimu- 
lating and very hard-working years for the 
young editor. Those who have watched 
him at his desk say it was extraordinary 
[31] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
to see with what apparent ease he turned 
off long and serious pieces of writing. 
When he determined that a thing was to 
be done, he went without hesitation or de- 
lay to his writing, and while another man 
would be considering the topic, he would 
have worked it out pen in hand ; but with 
the next decade his books began to appear 
and he was no longer so closely tied to his 
journalism. His interest in The C our ant 
was as great as ever. He had unremit- 
ting editorial oversight, but he no longer 
filled the whole editorial page, on occasion 
of necessity, by his own pen. 

The war having ended and his work 
having settled into more definite shape, he 
went with his wife for their jfirst jour- 
ney to Eiu'ope. He needed change and 
[32] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

repose. His editorials went on continu- 
ously, as if he were at home, but the sub- 
jects differed, and the papers were to be 
gathered into books. In the year 1872 
he published two volumes — one "Saunter- 
ings," recording his first experiences and 
impressions in Europe; the other "Back- 
Log Studies," a delightful series of essays 
on home-life written after his return. 

''Back-Log Studies" invites us into his 
home with the easy cordiality and true hos- 
pitality which were his own. The lesson 
to Peter, when the great sheet knit at the 
four corners was let down containing all 
manner of birds and beasts and he was 
commanded to call nothing common, was 
never needed by Warner's catholic mind 
and heart. In none of his books does 
[33] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

one see this so clearly, nor indeed do 
we anjrwhere find his wit more ex- 
quisite, his native sunshine more at 
large than between these covers. He 
says: "A wood fire on the hearth is a 
kindler of the domestic virtues." The 
whole book is a kind of apotheosis of 
home, portraying his modest ideal of what 
almost every happy pair can attain who 
are not stricken too deeply by discourage- 
ments and woes. Speaking of the world 
generally as being "a little off the track," 
he says: "Our American economy leaves 
no place for amusements; we merely add 
them to the burden of a life already full" ; 
and speaking of building the house he 
continues: "It took the race ages to build 
dwellings that would keep out rain; it has 
[34] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

taken longer to build houses airtight, but 
we are on the eve of success. We are 
only foiled by the ill-fitting, insincere 
work of the builders, who build for a day 
and charge for all time." The talk be- 
came very wise and pleasant by that fire- 
side both in reality and in the book. As 
to the latter it would be hard to find one 
pleasanter to read aloud for a small group 
of friends on a rainy day, who like the 
kind of writing that suggests conversa- 
tion and music and friendly interruptions. 
"Daylight disenchants," he says, "it draws 
one from the fireside and dissipates the idle 
illusions of conversation, except under cer- 
tain conditions. Let us say these condi- 
tions are: A house in the country, with 
some forest-trees near and a few ever- 
[35] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

greens, ... a snowstorm beginning 
out of a dark sky, falling in a soft pro- 
fusion that fills all the air. . • . Noth- 
ing makes us feel at home like a great 
snowstorm. ... In point of pure 
enjoyment, with an intellectual sparkle 
in it, I suppose that no luxurious loung- 
ing on tropical isles, set in tropical seas, 
compares with the positive happiness one 
may have before a great wood fire (not 
two sticks laid crossways in a grate) with 
a veritable New England winter raging 
outside. In order to get the highest en- 
joyment, the faculties must be alert and 
not be lulled into a mere recipient dul- 
ness." ... It was a late spring that 
year. "There was a popular longing 
for spring that was almost a prayer. 
[36] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

Easter was set a week earlier than the 
year before, but nothing seemed to do 
any good. We agreed, however, that, 
but for disappointed expectations and the 
prospect of late lettuce and peas, we were 
gaining by the fire as much as we were 
losing by the frost." . . • 

The spirit of the book may be gathered 
from these brief passages, but for the 
charming humour of it one must go to the 
pages themselves. We must write of 
Warner as a man, and of his books only as 
they express his nature and make evident 
the settled purposes of his life ; and so we 
deny ourselves longer quotations. "Back- 
Log Studies" has a peculiar charm be- 
cause it marks a period in a beneficent ex- 
istence when a man of thoughtful mind 
[37] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

looks about him and plants his feet as he 
does his trees among those who are to 
make his world, and recognises his home 
as the foundation of true work and devel- 
opment. 

One of the Warners' near neighbours 
was Mr. S. L. Clemens (Mark Twain), 
and in 1873 the two authors ventured upon 
what is always a more or less unsatisfac- 
tory scheme, writing a book together. It 
was a satire called ''The Gilded Age." In 
the preface the authors say, over their sig- 
natures, that every chapter was written 
jointly, the idea being to portray pecu- 
liarities developed in our country by the 
sudden acquisition of great wealth and the 
opening up of vast areas and new schemes 
suggested by new opportunities. With 
[38] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

all its ingenuities and cleverness, the book 
can hardly be called a literary success. A 
one-man power is always a necessity for 
true success, whether in the conception 
and execution of a book or in the govern- 
ment of the police of cities. Very close 
relations grew up between the two fam- 
ilies, and in a note from Mr. Clemens af- 
ter Warner's death he says, in reply to an 
appeal to him for letters: ''Alas, and alas, 
we are packed for Italy, and all valued 
letters are packed and stored with the 
silver and hymn-books. There were not 
many, of course, we being near neigh- 
bours, and communicating mainly by 
mouth. I wish I could send you War- 
ner's Invocation to L. on St. Valentine's 
morning, beginning: 

[39] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

^^ Come out into the slushy deavy 
In your gracious galoshes shod,*' 

but that is packed, too. I am of no use in 
reminiscing — my memory is worthless. 
Warner was always saying brilliant 
things, felicitous things, but one can't 
carry them in the mind in their exact lan- 
guage, and without that their glory is 
gone. But there is one remark — ^not 
made by Warner — which we do not for- 
get. You will note in it the sunshine 
shed by his personality. One day a young 
friend of ours came in with a fine light in 
her eye, and said: 'I've just had a good- 
morning from Mr. Warner, and I'm a 
happy girl for the day!' " 

Mrs. Stowe was still living at that time 
and was a near neighbour also and most 
[40] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

honoured guest, roaming at will in and 
out of the Warners' house, and in her 
latest age seating herself at the piano, 
playing and singing sometimes in her own 
weird fashion to the empty air. 

The Reverend Joseph Twichell was one 
of Warner's dearest Hartford friends. 
Mr. Twichell was so often introduced into 
Warner's conversation that many persons 
felt they had a certain acquaintance and 
wished they knew him better. The great 
preacher has lately written of his friend: 
"His humour was in all circumstances 
unforced, seeming to be unintended — ^the 
simply natural expression of the man. In 
the main it was of a playful quality, yet 
it could, too, on occasion, take on edge. 
When the late war with Spain was de- 
[41] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

clared, which he held to have been avoid- 
able and earnestly deprecated, coming one 
Sunday out of church, after hearing a ser- 
mon in which the preacher — ^who it may as 
well be owned was the present writer — 
had discoursed on war in the light of its 
incidental benefits, he said he had felt like 
rising in his place in the congregation and 
offering the motion: 'That, in consonance 
with the views just presented, we post- 
pone the Christian religion to a more con- 
venient season.' . . . When he first 
came to the notice of the general public as 
a writer and humourist, he was often 
spoken of as a new Charles Lamb. This 
he laughed at. . . . Yet, notwithstand- 
ing his disclaimer ... in the genial, 
gentle feeling for humanity, characteris- 
[42] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

tic of his humour, Charles Dudley War- 
ner was certainly a spiritual brother of 
Charles Lamb. . . . But his humour 
was always a more observable feature of 
his speech than of his writing. Nowhere 
else did it come so fully out as in his com- 
mon talk. • . . While on a visit to the 
Bermudas, as in our rambles up and down 
we passed the little single-room school- 
houses that are frequent in those islands, 
Warner, who was ever on the sociological 
quest, was quite apt to step in, and with 
apologies for interruption, interview the 
teachers, man or woman, black or white, 
and, after introductory statistical in- 
quiries, draw out the teacher's opinions on 
educational and other matters. On vari- 
ous such occasions, at his suggestion, 
[43] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

classes were called up to recite before him, 
and to them he propounded questions, 
sometimes outside the province of the sub- 
ject of their recitation, obtaining, in in- 
stances, answers remarkable and exceed- 
ingly entertaining. It was all done in a 
manner of interest and friendliness which 
was, indeed, unfeigned, and with an entire 
gravity of demeanour which the bystander 
found it extremely difficult to preserve. 
. . . But that fashion of gleaning was 
one of his ways, and reveals a source of 
the material of humour with which he was 
supplied; it hints the secret, too, of the 
human sympathy with which his humour 
was pervaded. . . . For more than 
thirty years Charles Dudley Warner was 
my neighbour and friend. The humour, 
[44] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

softly radiant, refined . . . that was 
so distinct a feature of his mind and utter- 
ance, was memorably to me one of the re- 
freshments that went with his dear com- 
pany for all that time. But though the 
impression of it vividly remains, and can- 
not but be abiding, in trying to convey 
that impression, far fewer things to the 
purpose than I should have expected re- 
turn to me in shape to tell." . . . 

While his friendships were growing 
more numerous, deeper, and stronger at 
home, Warner's life was widening in its 
reach. The newspaper and his books 
were anchors holding him to Hartford 
perpetually, but he was aware that his 
work would be enriched by a wider knowl- 
edge of the world and by the rest which 
[45] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

comes with change. Therefore, in the 
thirty years of life between 1870 and 
1900, the year of his death, Warner made 
five jom^neys to Europe, involving seven 
years of absence. These five absences 
yielded good literary fruit not alone di- 
rectly by his books of travel, but by the 
general enriching of life and thought 
which such joiu^neys and such close obser- 
vation aiFord. 

In the sunmaer of 1873 he went to Nova 
Scotia with his friend Mr. Twichell, mak- 
ing Baddeck his objective point. A 
pleasant little book, which he calls "Bad- 
deck and That Sort of Thing: Notes of a 
Sunny Fortnight in the Provinces," was 
the result, dedicated to his fellow-traveller. 
Hartford was soon regarded as a half- 
[46] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

way land of rest between New York and 
Boston. It began to be a habit with him 
to spend a week or two every winter in or 
about Boston. An earher acquaintance 
with Howells was now ripening into the 
friendship of a Hfetime. Howells was 
then living in Cambridge and editor of 
the Atlantic Monthly. Norton's house, 
with its generous hospitalities, was also 
open to him, and Longfellow was there 
with his kindly welcome. Warner wrote 
to Howells in March, 1873, from Hart- 
ford: "To have your good opinion of 
'Back Logs' would quite content me, but 
to have it expressed so exquisitely nearly 
upsets me. Your analysis of that first 
sentence is so much better J:han the sen- 
tence itself that I think I shall ask Mr. 
[47] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

Osgood to substitute it in the next edition. 
And you have me at a perpetual disad- 
vantage. For if ever I try to express my 
opinion of the 'Chance Acquaintance' at 
length, I should quite fail I am sure. We 
read it with increasing dehght in your 
subtle opening of the characters of the 
two lovers. I suppose it wouldn't do to 
tie a bunch of firecrackers to A.'s coat-tail, 
would it? And you are coming pretty 
soon? • . ." 

Returning from Boston to Hartford, 
the following week would often find him 
in New York, where the Century, the 
Authors', and the Players' clubs threw 
their doors open to him, as the Tavern 
Club and the University loved to do in 
Boston. 

[48] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

Again he writes to Howells in 1874: 
"Failing to obtain either a clerkship or 
any back or forward pay at Washington, 
I came home last night. Hartford is af- 
ter all the best place for an honest man 
who is poor. If you only lived here I 
should be content never to go away any 
more. I find on my return the flavour of 
your visit just as strong as it was when 
you left. Have you found out yet — I 
suppose you have — ^that better than repu- 
tation in Peoria and Hong Kong is the 
attachment of one sincere person who is 
fond of you?'' 

In May he writes: "My dear Mr. How- 
ells: To-day is fit to make a body cry; sky 
distant and deep blue, clouds fleecy and 
floating, the world full of apple-blossoms. 
[49] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

On such a day you said you d come. You 
admit that man is a twofold being. It 
takes two of him to make one. You 
promised long ago to visit here. You ad- 
mit that. How did you keep your prom- 
ise? You only half came. Now we ex- 
pect the whole of you. We are compelled 
to look upon you, although you are poet, 
essayist, traveller, and critic, as only a 
fraction, without Mrs. Howells." In Au- 
gust, of the same year, he continues: "You 
dear old fellow, and you are not so very 
old either when you come to think of it, 
but I couldn't be fonder of you if you 
were as old as Catherine Beecher." Again 
he says, in October: "My dear friend, 
since you will not let me give you the title 
of 'Mr.,' which Harvard conferred on 
[50] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

you, the time has come to say good-bye, 
and I hate to say it and am not jocular a 
bit. I was lonesome a good while after 
we came away from your sincere house- 
hold. It almost makes me cry now to 
see Johnny with swollen eyes and sup- 
pressed sobs thrusting his hands into the 
basket of grapes, and casting glances 
upon the wreck on the table to see if there 
was anything else that could better stay 
his grief. Happy boyhood that can con- 
quer grief by filling the mouth. You 
wouldn't believe what a great place you 
have got in my heart, both of you in both 
our hearts? I feel so much richer for it. 
God keep us all safe and well, and give us 
more days for the enjoyment of a friend- 
ship which I believe has no selfishness in 

it" 

^^* [ 51 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

The last letter of the year is from 
Cairo as he is leaving to go up the Nile, a 
long, full letter, such as a skilled writer 
can write and a friend loves to receive. I 
can only give a hint of it here. Every 
reader of Warner should know his "Win- 
ter on the Nile," and, knowing that, the 
charming description in this letter need 
not be reproduced. He says: "I only 
write to give you a last word before we 
start, and to tell you how much you both 
have been in our minds. I know the situ- 
ation would take hold of you powerfully. 
We have wanted you ever since we have 
been in Egypt. . . . For myself I have 
no human feeling when I am cold, and 
very little when the sky is cloudy. As yet 
I have written nothing — save a letter of 
[ 52 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

news to the New York Times — barely in 
my diary. I have had no leisure, and, be- 
sides, how can one write with such a crowd 
of new things before the eye? . . . Do 
you know what a dreary thing a news- 
paper is, and what relation has that thing 
you call literature to this vast serenity and 
on-going of the ages into which we have 
fallen. I felt ashamed of myself when I 
looked at the sphinx, and that great 
pyramid — is it not more important to find 
out what it was built for than it is to keep 
the run of your little politics and our small 
book-making? What a tremendous space 
we Americans fill in history! And we are 
about to celebrate our centennial. I saw 
a wooden statue of fine workmanship in 
the museum here that is probably 6,000 
[53] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

years old. Did you see that magnificent 
Doric temple at Psestima which was built 
before the she-wolf suckled Romulus? 
Just over yonder is old Cairo, built not 
long after the hegira of the Prophet. 
There is a portion of the citadel built by 
Saladin. All about and imder Cairo are 
the mountainous ruins of cities and civili- 
sations. And will you still publish what 
you are pleased to call the Atlantic 
Monthly^. Just now I went out of our 
front door to look at the stars and stepped 
upon an Arab. Perhaps it was only a 
Nubian, one of our crew, who are sleeping 
under the sky on our lower deck. Well, 
God bless you both. I wish I could see 
you just for half an hour." 

"My Winter on the Nile" is perhaps 
[54] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

the acme of Warner's achievements in his 
books of travel. The southern sun, the 
rest, the fresh field of observation seemed 
to satisfy his physical and mental life, and 
we can almost warm ourselves in his sun- 
shine. His style is always full of his own 
charm and exactness. His intelligence, 
his sympathy, were coming into fullest 
bloom. He speaks of a family of culti- 
vated Germans on the same steamer "who 
handle the English language as delicately 
as if it were glass, and make of it the most 
naive and interesting form of speech." 
At Alexandria he says: ''In one moment 
the Orient flashes upon the bewildered 
traveller; and though he may travel far 
and see strange sights, and penetrate the 
hollow shell of Eastern mystery, he will 
[ 55 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

never see again at once such a complete 
contrast to all his previous experience.'' 
The motto of the book is from "Amrou, 
Conqueror of Egypt, to the Khalif 
Omar," and well describes what Warner 
found to enjoy. ''O Commander of the 
Faithful, Egypt is a compound of black 
earth and green plants, between a pulver- 
ised mountain and a red sand. Along the 
valley descends a river, on which the bless- 
ing of the Most High reposes, both in the 
evening and the morning, and which rises 
and falls with the revolutions of the sun 
and moon. According to the vicissitudes 
of the seasons, the face of the country is 
adorned with a silver wave, a verdant em- 
erald, and the deep yellow of a golden 
harvest." 

[56] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

Warner says: "When we are yet 
twenty miles from Cairo, there in the 
southwest, visible for a moment and then 
hidden by the trees, . . . are two forms, 
the sight of which gives us a thrill. They 
stand still in that purple distance in which 
we have seen them all our lives. Beyond 
these level fields and these trees of syca- 
more and date-palm, beyond the Nile, on 
the desert's edge, with the low Libyan 
hills falling off behind them, as delicate 
in form and colour as clouds, as enduring 
as the sky they pierce, the Pyramids of 
Geezeh! I try to shake off the impres- 
sion of their solemn antiquity, and imag- 
ine how they would strike one if all 
their mystery were removed. But that 
is impossible. The imagination always 
[57] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
prompts the eye. And yet I believe that 
standing where they do stand and in their 
atmosphere, they are the most impressive 
of hmnan structures/' 

He continues later: — "The pyramidal 
towers of the great temple of Medeenet 
Haboo are thought to be the remains 
of the palace of Rameses III. Here, 
indeed, the Egyptologists point out his 
harem and the private apartments. . . . 
It is from such sculptures as one finds 
here that scholars have been able to re- 
habilitate old Egyptian society, and tell 
us not only what the Egyptians did, but 
what they were thinking about. The 
scholar to whom we are most indebted for 
the reconstruction of the ancient life of 
the Egyptians, Sir Gardner Wilkinson, 
[58] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

is able, not only to describe to us a soiree j 
from paintings in tombs at Thebes, but to 
tell us what the company talked about and 
what their emotions were. . . . This is 
very wonderful art and proves that the 
Egyptians excelled all who came after 
them in the use of the chisel and the 
brush." 

Through all the wonder and enthusiasm 
inspired by monuments of the past, War- 
ner never failed to see the present. He 
exclaims, seeing the miserable inhabitants 
of to-day: "Not more palaces and sugar 
mills, O Khedive, will save this Egypt, 
but some plan that will lift these women 
out of dirt and ignorance!" 

At Dakkeh, about seventy miles from 
Philse, he speaks of Ergamenes, an Ethi- 
[59] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

opian king, who is said to have begun the 
handsome temple at this place, and also to 
have gained a reputation by a change in 
his religion as it was practised in Meroe. 
"When the priests thought a king had 
reigned long enough, it was their custom 
to send him notice that the gods had or- 
dered him to die; and the king, who would 
rather die than commit an impiety, used 
to die. But Ergamenes tried another 
method, which he found worked just as 
well; he assembled all the priests, and slew 
them — a very sensible thing on his part." 
"Nothing in Egypt," he says, "not even 
the temples and pyramids, has given us 
such an idea of the immense labour the 
Egyptians expended in building as these 
vast excavations in the rock at Silsilis. 
[60] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
We have wondered before where all the 
stone came from that we have seen piled 
up in buildings and heaped in miles of 
ruins ; we wonder now what use could have 
been made of all the stone quarried from 
these hills. • . • What hells these quar- 
ries must have been," he continued, "for 
the workmen, exposed to the blaze of a 
sun intensified by the glaring reflection 
from the light-coloured rock and stifled 
for want of air. They have left the 
marks of their unending task in these lit- 
tle chisellings on the face of the sand- 
stone walls. . . . These quarries are as 
deserted now as the temples that were 
taken from them; but nowhere else in 
Egypt was I more impressed with the 
duration, the patience, the greatness of 
[61] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

the race that accomplished such prodigies 
of labour." 

It is really difficult to turn away from 
Warner's book on Egypt. His chapter 
on the "Tombs at Thebes," in spite of all 
the learned books written on the subject, 
is, in its own way, unrivalled. 

After the tombs of the kings, he 
thought little remained which was worth 
while to visit. He made two expeditions 
to these gigantic mausoleums. "It is not 
an easy trip, for they are situated in wild 
ravines or gorges that lie beyond the west- 
ern mountains which circle the plains and 
ruins of Thebes. . . . The path winds, 
but it is steep; the sun blazes on it; every 
step is in pulverised limestone, that seems 
to have been calcined by the intense heat, 
[62] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

and rises in irritating powder; the moun- 
tain-side is white, chalky, glaring, reflect- 
ing the solar rays with blinding brilliancy, 
and not a breath of air comes to temper 
the furnace temperature. • . . When 
we pass out of the glare of the sun 
and descend the incline down which the 
mummy went, we feel as if we had begun 
his awful journey. On the walls are 
sculptured the ceremonies and liturgies of 
the dead, the grotesque monsters of the 
under-world, which will meet him and as- 
sail him on his pilgrimages, the deities, 
friendly and unfriendly, the tremendous 
scenes of cycles of transmigration. * . . 
We come at length, whatever other won- 
ders or beauties may detain us, to the 
king, the royal mummy. • . . Some- 
[63] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

where in this vast and dark mausoleum the 
mummy has been deposited; he has with 
him the roll of the Fimeral Ritual; the 
sacred searabseus is on his breast; in one 
chamber bread and wine are set out; his 
bearers withdraw, the tomb is closed, 
sealed, all trace of its entrance effaced. 
The mummy begins its pilgrimage. The 
Ritual (Lenormant epitome) describes all 
the series of pilgrimages of the soul in the 
lower-world; ... it embodies the phi- 
losophy and religion of Egypt; the basis 
of it is the immortality of the soul, that is 
of the souls of the justified, but a clear 
notion of the soul's personality apart from 
the body it does not give ! ... In this 
wonderful book the deceased is allowed to 
speak of his own morality, and among the 
£64] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

wonderful things said is the following: 
'I have given food to the hungry, drink 
to the thirsty, and clothes to the naked.'' " 
June, 1875, finds him writing to How- 
ells from Venice: "We are here at last — 
the East kept us so long. . • . I have 
given half a year to the dead East in these 
days of centennials and thronging ambi- 
tions. ... I am writing you this from 
the top story (with plants in the balconies) 
of what is probably a poor palace, on the 
Grand Canal, second door below palace 
Barboso,and opposite Salviati's glass shop. 
I have taken this admirable little perch to 
write in, and was never better suited in 
my life, only I do wish I had sat up 
nights and written up Egypt and killed 
myself in so doing while I was there. It 
[65] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

is SO hard to bring back the colour and 
bloom. ..." 

Again in August, from the same place, 
he writes: ''A photo of the Casa Falieri I 
cannot find in any of the shops. It is 
very stupid of the photographers not to 
take one of the most picturesque houses in 
Venice, and one so interesting for its occu- 
pants. I say nothing of the Falier. I 
do not care to dig up the dead — but what 
a world this is, when no more honour is 
paid to the man who has done more to 
bring Venice into good repute than any 
man in the last hundred years, except per- 
haps Ruskin. . . . Americans are al- 
ways floating past and staring about, and 
probably they don't know that in this very 
palace the only true history of Egypt and 
[66] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

Rameses II. is now actually building it- 
self up day by day. Hang it, there is no 
chance for modest merit. By the way, I 
want to tell you something. I fell in love 
with you over again the other day. I 
chanced upon an English copy of the 
'Italian Journeys' and re-read it with in- 
tense enjoyment. What felicity, what 
delicacy. Your handling of the English 
language charms me to the core, and you 
catch characters and shades — nu-an-ces — 
of it. Why do I break out upon you in 
this bold manner? Well, for this, you are 
writing another story, probably it is all 
executed, in fact, now. Probably it is to 
^e another six-months' child. It will be 
as good as the other, no doubt, and that is 
saying everything. But, it is time you 
[67] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

quit paddling along shore, and strike out 
into the open. Ask Mrs. Howells (with 
my love) if it is not so. The time has 
come for you to make an opus — ^not only a 
study on a large canvas, but a picture. 
Write a long novel, one that we can dive 
into with confidence, and not feel that we 
are to strike bottom in the first plunge. 
Permit me the extent of the figure — we 
want to swim in you, not merely to lave 
our faces. I have read Mr. James's 
'Roderick Hudson' up to September, and 
I give in. It is not too much to call it 
great. What consummate art it all is, no 
straining, but easily the bull's-eye every 
time. Another noticeable thing is that, 
while it is calm and high in culture, there 
is none of the sneer in it or any cant of 
[68] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
culture, and I wonder if the author himself 
knows that his characters never seem to be 
used by him as stalking-horses to vent an 
opinion which the author does not quite 
care to father. His characters always 
seem to speak only for themselves. I 
take it there is no better evidence of the 
author's success than that." 

''In the Levant," which appeared the 
same year, is a book for travellers to read 
to-day. Travellers, like biographers, have 
not been famed in the past for being 
truth-telling folk, but in the latter part of 
the nineteenth century, if no earlier, it 
was discovered that nothing is so witty 
and attractive as a bit of truth, whether 
it concerns a man's temper or his jour- 
ney to the Levant. Warner was one of 
[69] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

the men who discovered this. His ac- 
count of Palestine would keep many a 
sentimentalist by his own fireside if he 
had the common sense to read "In the 
Levant" before starting. The preface 
says: "In the winter and spring of 1875 
the writer made the tour of Egypt and 
the Levant. . . . The notes of the jour- 
ney were taken and the books were written 
before there were any signs of the present 
Oriental disturbances, and the observa- 
tions made are therefore imcoloured by 
any expectation of the existing state of 
affairs. Signs enough were visible of a 
transition period, extraordinary but hope- 
ful; with the existence of poverty, op- 
pression, superstition, and ignorance, 
were mingling Occidental and Christian 
[70] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
influences, the faint beginnings of a re- 
vival of learning, and the stronger pulsa- 
tions of awakening commercial and indus- 
trial life. The best hope of this revival 
was then, as it is now, in peace and not in 
war," Nearly thirty years have passed 
since these words were written, and the 
Turks, with the forlorn peoples under 
their flag, are still unredeemed, oppressive, 
unregenerate. ''Beyrout," Warner says, 
''is the brightest spot in Syria or Pales- 
tine, the only pleasant city that we saw, 
and the centre of a moral and intellectual 
impulse the importance of which we can- 
not overestimate. . . . The fitful and 
unintelligent Turkish rule cannot stifle its 
exuberant prosperity; but above all the 
advantages which nature has given it, I 
[71] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

should attribute its brightest prospects to 
the influence of the American mission, 
and to the estabhshment of Beyrout Col- 
lege. . . • The transient visitor can see 
something of this in the dawning of a bet- 
ter social life, in the beginning of an im- 
provement in the condition of women, in 
an rmmistakable spirit of inquiry, . . . 
and this new leaven is not confined to a 
sect, nor limited to a race; it is working, 
slowly it is true, in the whole of Syrian 
society. . . • Our American Consul 
was not in good repute with many of the 
foreign residents. . . . The dragomans 
of the Consulate, who act as interpreters 
and are executors of the Consul's author- 
ity, have no pay, but their position gives 
them a consideration in the community. 
[72] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
. . • The salary of the American Consul 
at Beyrout is $2,000 — a sum in this expen- 
sive city which is insufficient to support a 
Consul who has a family in the style of a 
respectable citizen. . . . The English 
name is almost universally respected in 
the East, so far as my limited experience 
goes, in the character of its consuls; the 
same cannot be said of the American." 
This experience of nearly thirty years ago 
reads as if it were yesterday. It is to be 
hoped that a better grade of men now go 
as consuls whose pay is sufficient for the 
representative of the United States, but 
that a brave man, Magelsson, the present 
consul (1903), was supposed only yester- 
day to be murdered because of his coura- 
geous and upright behaviour, shows that 
[73] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

the Turkish Government may yet need 
stronger proof that civilised nations can 
no longer endure such faithlessness and 
ignorance. "We were not sorry," adds 
Warner, "to leave even beautiful Beyrout, 
and would have liked to see the last of 
Turkish rule as well." 

There are few things in the book more 
characteristic than all he writes of Beth- 
lehem. Among other things he says: 
"Bethlehem is to all the world one of the 
sweetest of words. A tender and roman- 
tic interest is thrown about it as the burial- 
place of Rachel, as the scene of Ruth's 
primitive story, and of David's boyhood 
and kingly consecration; so that no other 
place in Judea, by its associations, was so 
fit to be the gate through which the Divine 
[74] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

Child should come into the world. And 
the traveller to-day can visit it with per- 
haps less shock to his feelings of rever- 
ence, certainly with a purer and simpler 
enjoyment, than any other place in Holy 
Land, . . . There was one chamber, or 
rather vault, that we entered with genuine 
emotion. This was the cell of Jerome, 
hermit and scholar, whose writings have 
given him the title of Father of the 
Church. . . . There is, I suppose, no 
doubt that this is the study in which he 
composed many of his more important 
treatises. It is a vaulted chamber, about 
twenty feet square by nine feet high. 
There is in Venice a picture of the study 
of Jerome by Carpaccio, which represents 
a delightful apartment; the saint is seen 
[75] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

in his study in a rich neglige robe ; at the 
side of his desk are musical instruments, 
music stands, and sheets of music, as if he 
were accustomed to give soirees; on the 
chimney-piece are Greek vases and other 
objects of virtu J and in the middle of the 
room is a poodle-dog of the most worldly 
and useless of the canine breed. The 
artist should have seen the real study of 
the hermit — a grim unornamented vault, 
in which he passed his days in mortifica- 
tions of the body, hearing always ringing 
in his ears, in his disordered mental and 
physical condition, the last trump of 
judgment.'' 

"In the Levant" is full of knowledge 
and wit and wisdom. It would be diffi- 
cult to find a truer and loveher picture of 
[76] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

the ^gean Sea and its famous islands; 
of Ephesus and the remains of the later 
glories of the Greeks, Of the Athenians 
he says: "They were an early people; they 
liked the dewy freshness of the morning; 
. . . the rising sun often greeted the 
orators on the bema and an audience on 
the terrace below. We had seen the 
Acropolis in almost every aspect, but I 
thought one might perhaps catch more of 
its ancient spirit at sunrise than at any 
other hour, . . • The Athenians ought 
to be assembhng on the Pnyx to hear 
Demosthenes. . . . One would like to 
have sat upon these benches, that look on 
the sea, and listened to a chorus from the 
Antigone this morning. One would like 
to have witnessed that scene, when Aris- 
[77] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
tophanes on this stage mimicked and 
ridiculed Socrates, and the philosopher, 
rising from his undistinguished seat high 
up among the people, replied." War- 
ner concludes with these words, satisfac- 
tory to all true travellers: "For myself, 
now that we are out of the Orient and 
away from all its squalor and cheap mag- 
nificence, I turn again to it with a longing 
which I cannot explain ; it is still a land of 
the imagination/' 

The Orient will be older and newer, a 
diiFerent land, in short, before another 
book of travels will be written to compare 
with the two-in-one of which we have 
spoken. They are volumes delightful to 
those who stay at home, enlightening to 
those who wish to go abroad, and refresh- 
[78] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

ing to all who have suffered the weariness 
of travel and have not seen so much in the 
same places. Warner's taste for archae- 
ology, which thus far had been a slumber- 
ing inner consciousness, rather than a keen 
interest developing into knowledge, be- 
gan to awaken the moment he knew Pses- 
tum on his way to Egypt. With his pow- 
ers of assimilation and love of study in 
their ripeness, he emerged from Egypt 
born anew into one department of human 
life and knowledge. The joy and excite- 
ment of this knowledge never grew dim. 
It was not like him to insist that others 
should of necessity feel his interest in 
Egypt. Therefore, he says in the begin- 
ning of his journey that ''there is no 
reason why any one indisposed to do so 
[79] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

should accompany us/' but "we are off to 
Psestum." Even then, after expressing 
something of the charm of the spot and 
saying that ''in all Europe there are no 
ruins better worthy the study of the ad- 
mirer of noble architecture than these," he 
adds: "The Temple of Neptune is older 
than the Parthenon, its Doric sister, at 
Athens. It was probably built before the 
Persians of Xerxes occupied the Acrop- 
olis and saw from there the flight of their 
ruined fleet out of the Strait of Salamis. 
It was built when the Doric had attained 
the acme of its severe majesty, and it is to- 
day almost perfect on the exterior. . . . 
At first we thought the temple small, and 
did not even realise its two hundred feet of 
length, but the longer we looked at it the 
[80] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

larger it grew to the eye, until it seemed 
to expand into gigantic size; and from 
whatever point it was viewed its harmoni- 
ous proportions were an increasing de- 
light. The beauty is not in any orna- 
ment, for even the pediment is and always 
was vacant, but in its admirable lines. 
The two other temples are fine specimens 
of Greek architecture, also Doric, pure 
and without fault, with only a little ten- 
dency to depart from severe simplicity in 
the curve of the capitals, and yet they did 
not interest us. They are of a period 
only a little later than the Temple of Nep- 
tune, and that model was before their 
builders, yet they missed the extraordi- 
nary, many say almost spiritual, beauty of 
that edifice. We sought the reason, and 
[81] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

found it in the fact that there are abso- 
lutely no straight lines in the Temple of 
Neptune. The side rows of columns 
curve a little out; the end rows curve a 
little in; at the ends the base line of the 
columns curves a trifle from the sides to 
the centre, and the line of the architrave 
does the same. ... It is not repeated 
in the other temples, the builders of which 
do not seem to have known its secret. 
Had the Greek colony lost the art of this 
perfect harmony in the little time that 
probably intervened between the erection 
of these edifices? It was still kept at 
Athens, as the Temple of Theseus and the 
Parthenon testify." 

It was through the columns of this 
Temple of Neptune at Paestum that War- 
[82] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

ner looked toward Egypt, where he was 
to see ''the first columns, prototypes of the 
Doric order, chiselled by man." Few 
travellers, even those who bear the learned 
title of archaeologists, have been so well 
fitted by nature to explore the unspeak- 
able wonders of the Orient, and from that 
day in Psestum until the day when he took 
his last view of the iEgean Islands his 
knowledge and fervour grew apace. 



[83] 



Ill 

July, 1876, found Mr. Warner again in 
Hartford. He wrote to Mr, Howells: 
"My dear, dear friend: I have come into 
this land of Family and Chance Acquaint- 
ances and find it hot and dirty, and in 
debt, and I am in sympathy with it. It is 
only when I think of you and the dear 
friends whose presence would make even 
the peninsula of the White Sea a para- 
dise that I have heart and resolve to do as 
Cranmer told Ridley to do under similar 
circumstances, play the man, though I am 
burnt to a crisp. . . . Mrs. Warner is 
sunning herself in the thought that she is 
at home. That woman is a deep and de- 
signing patriot, and would dwell here f or- 
[84] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

ever, if her plans were not upset by her 
private and ill-concealed affection for me. 
. . . God bless you for your generous 
notice of the 'Levant' book. It quite took 
my breath away, and I am not sure I 
should have survived, if it were not that 
Mr. Prime and General McClellan and 
others of that sort in New York are say- 
ing, publicly and privately, that it is the 
best book written on Egypt. I myself 
still doubt, however, if it is as good in all 
respects as the Pentateuch. But I am 
sincerely astonished at its good reception." 
Again in December he says: ''Just now 
the nearest thing is old Egypt — the 
Egypt 1,000 years before Abraham. I 
am trying to write a lecture about it for 
the institute here. A weak yielding to go 
[85] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

before the public which I suspect I shall 
bitterly repent. But just now I am tired, 
tired of writing, of books, of editorials, of 
politics, of the everlasting squabble. I 
wish I were a Returning Board; I would 
elect myself to go on a mission to some 
misty land of sun and fleas, where the 
wicked and the weary dwell together and 
don't care. I am again deeply in your 
debt for another exceedingly friendly 
notice, and as graceful as kind. I will 
not thank you for it, but it gives me cour- 
age and comfort. Mr. Ripley conde- 
scends to rather sit down on the book with 
his broad imderstanding as rather a liter- 
ary falling off. On the contrary, it seems 
to me rather less slovenly than some of my 
other performances. Mark says that "to 
[86] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

give a humourous book to Ripley is like 
sending a first-chop paper of chewing to- 
bacco to a young ladies' seminary for them 
to review." 

With all the literary engagements just 
referred to above, he naturally found it 
necessary to get away again in the sum- 
mer of 1877. The season was spent in 
the Adirondacks, and another book, "In 
the Wilderness," was published the fol- 
lowing year as a result. It contains an 
amusing story of a man unaccustomed to 
rougher wild life than one can meet black- 
berrying, finding himself face to face with 
a bear on the same business. It con- 
tains also a description of the flight of a 
doe from the hunters, which is one of the 
finest appeals of that nature in literature. 
[87] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

He wrote to Howells from Hartford in 
April, 1877: ''We greatly enjoyed your 
first of April letter, but, of course, we do 
not take it seriously. We are not to be 
put oif by feigned marriage in Quebec, 
nor by a grand burst into the fashion of 
Newport. For a person who dislikes so- 
ciety, the Newport cottage is just the 
thing; it will make him dislike it all the 
more. . . . You must come in May. 
Ask Mrs. Howells to consider how few 
springs there are in this little life of ours, 
and what it is to neglect one of them. Is 
there any good in life except we snatch the 
little pleasures. ... I have just read 
your last Venice. When that story is 
ended you are going to stand up among 
the masters, so keep your head level." 
[88] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

Again in October he says: "We shall look 
for you on the 25th, next Thursday. 
That will suit us, provided the weather is 
propitious. Let us hope it will be. The 
last part of the week suits me, for I have 
a partial let-up Saturday and Sunday. 
If the weather is good, we want to take 
you to the Talcott Mountain Tower and 
show you the kingdom of the earth dyed 
red and yellow and brown, and to South 
Manchester to show you the ideal factory 
village of the world." And later in the 
month he wrote: "What a charming visit 
you gave us, except that it was so wretch- 
edly short. It seemed heartless for us to 
go to bed while you two were driving on 
through the sand and darkness of Massa- 
chusetts — the native State of neither of 
[89] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
you, toward a midnight horse-car ter- 
mination. We sat up till one o'clock, 
when we judged you were safe in Boston, 
and then we stopped talking about you 
and went to bed. We didn't say any- 
thing about you, however, that you might 
not have heard, if not with profit, cer- 
tainly with pleasure. We dare to hope 
that our friendship is a little solidified by 
this visit and put upon the unremote fam- 
ily ground." In November he says: "I 
feel greatly encouraged by yoiu* opinion 
of 'My Only Boy.' Isn't he a little like 
your 'John'? I hope you may like him 
all through. I only wish you were multi- 
plied by 20,000. But I fear you are like 
Jean Paul, 'The Only One.' I cannot 
hope that anyone will enter into the spirit 
[90] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

of the *Boy' as you did. I suspect that 
you saw him a good deal through the form 
of your dear 'John/ and it is too much to 
expect that you will lend 'John' to all the 
people who ought to read and buy the 
book. . . . The notice is thoroughly 
lovely and charming, the most sympa- 
thetic in the world. It quite takes away 
my power to give you ordinary thanks. I 
wish the book were half as good as the 
notice. Why could you have the heart to 
carelessly take up your pen in that way 
and say, 'There, my boy, that was the 
way to have done it.' Well, it is worth 
writing a book to get one of your notices, 
and I am tempted to write an autobiog- 
raphy merely to extract an essay from 
you. If you were only my enemy now 
[91] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

and had written that notice, how I should 
love you. . . • We had a very good 
time in New York and saw a great many 
people, who saw us. ... I liked 
especially Mr. W. W. Story, whom I saw 
at the Century, and also at a breakfast at 
Botta's, where Mr. Bryant and Mr. Rip- 
ley and a dozen or two swells were pres- 
ent. Whitelaw Reid was also there." In 
1879, writing to Howells from Hartford, 
he surprises us by saying that he had been 
writing on ''The People for Whom 
Shakespeare Wrote." The book was not 
pubHshed until 1897, but a large part of 
it was written, perhaps one-half, enough 
for two papers of the Atlantic Monthly, 
in these busy days. In July, 1879, he 
writes to Howells: "You see I am jimket- 
192] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

ing a good deal though I contrive to 
keep up my editorial by writing ahead 
and behind. . . . Also last week I 
went to the centennial of the town of 
Cummington (in which I was nearly 
born — as Plainfield was set off from 
it in 1785) and stayed with the two 
lovely Bryant brothers, who had come 
on from Princeton, 111., at the old home- 
sxeaQ. • • • 

Warner's most absorbing topic just at 
this time was "The Work of Washington 
Irving," and an essay on this subject is 
one of his excellent pieces of writing. 
He also wrote the biography of Irving, 
the initial volume of the ''American Men 
of Letters Series," of which he was ed- 
itor. The list of Lives written by men of 
[93] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

his choice is an excellent one. He was am- 
bitious to do the work well, and America 
has to thank him for a biography of Em- 
erson by O. W. Holmes; of Poe by G. 
E. Woodberry, and other Lives by men 
of talent and genius, written with distin- 
guished ability. 

If Warner himself had done nothing 
else, the "Life of Washington Irving" 
would have made his literary gift evi- 
dent, and what was of still larger 
value, his power of understanding the 
character of Irving and differentiat- 
ing it in behalf of the long future. 
He says: ''Washington Irving's writ- 
ings induce to reflection, to quiet mus- 
ing, to tenderness for traditions; they 
amuse, they entertain, they call a check to 
[94] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

the feverishness of common life; but they 
are rarely stimulative or suggestive. . . . 
It is very fortunate that a writer who can 
reach the great public and entertain it can 
also elevate and refine its tastes, set before 
it high ideas, instruct it agreeably, and all 
this in a style that belongs to the best 
literature. . . • The service that he 
rendered to American letters no critic dis- 
putes; nor is there any question of our 
national indebtedness to him for investing 
a crude and new land with the enduring 
charms of romance and tradition. In this 
respect our obligation to him is that of 
Scotland to Scott and Burns, and it is an 
obligation due only, in all history, to here 
and there a fortunate creator to whose 
genius opportunity is kind. 'The Knick- 
[95] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
erbocker Legend' and the romance with 
which Irving has invested the Hudson are 
a priceless legacy, and this would remain 
an imperishable possession in popular tra- 
dition if the literature creating it were de- 
stroyed. . . . This creation is sufficient 
to secure for him an immortality, a 
length of earthly remembrance that all 
the rest of his writings together might not 
give. . . . Irving regarded life not 
from the philanthropic, the economic, the 
pohtical, the philosophic, the metaphysic, 
the scientific, or the theologic, but purely 
from the Hterary point of view. He 
belongs to that small class of which John- 
son and Goldsmith are perhaps as good 
types as any, and to which America 
has added very few. The literary point 
I 96 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

of view is taken by few in any generation ; 
it may seem to the world of very little con- 
sequence in the pressure of all the complex 
interests of life, and it may even seem 
trivial amid the tremendous energies ap- 
plied to immediate aiFairs; but it is the 
point of view that endures; if its creations 
do not mould human life, like the Roman 
law, they remain to charm and civilise, like 
the poems of Horace. You must not ask 
more of them than that. This attitude 
toward life is defensible on the highest 
grounds. ... It is not a question 
whether the work of the literary man is 
higher than that of the reformer or the 
statesman; it is a distinct work and is jus- 
tified by the result, even when the work is 
that of a humourist only. We recognise 
[97] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

this in the case of the poet. Although 
Goethe has been reproached for his lack 
of sympathy with the liberalising move- 
ment of his day (as if his novels were 
quieting influences), it is felt by this gen- 
eration that the author of 'Faust' needs 
no apology that he did not spend his en- 
ergies in the effervescing politics of the 
German states. • . . I cannot bring 
myself to exclude Irving's moral quality, 
from a literary estimate. There is some- 
thing that made Scott and Irving person- 
ally loved by the millions of their readers, 
who had only the dirmnest ideas of their 
personality. This was some quality per- 
ceived in what they wrote. Each one can 
define it for himself; there it is, and I do 
not see why it is not as integral a part of 
[98] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

the authors — an element in the estimate of 
their future position — as what we term 
their intellect, their knowledge, their skill, 
or their art. However you rate it, you 
cannot account for Irving's influence 
in the world without it. In his ten- 
der tribute to Irving, the great-hearted 
Thackeray, who saw as closely as anybody 
the place of mere literary art in the sum 
total of life, quoted the dying words of 
Scott to Lockhart, 'Be a good man, my 
dear.' We know well enough that the 
great author of 'The Newcomes' and the 
great author of 'The Heart of Mid- 
lothian' recognised the abiding value in 
literature of integrity, sincerity, purity, 
charity, faith. These are beneficences, and 

Irving's literature, walk around it, and 
LofC. J- 99 -J 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

measure it by whatever critical instru- 
ments you will, is a beneficent literature. 

"The author loved good women and lit- 
tle children and a pure life; he had faith 
in his fellow-man, a kindly sympathy with 
the lowest, without any subservience to the 
highest; he retained a behef in the possi- 
bility of chivalrous actions, and did not 
care to envelop them in a cynical suspi- 
cion ; he was an author still capable of an 
enthusiasm. His books are wholesome, 
full of sweetness and charm, of humour 
without any sting, amusement without 
any stain; and their more solid quahties 
are marred by neither pedantry nor pre- 
tension.'* 

Much of this also may be truthfully said 
of Charles Dudley Warner. His gifts 
[100] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

never carried him so far as to rank him 
among these writers of whom he was 
speaking in original conception, but he 
never wavered in his idea of the value 
of the literary point of view to one who 
was eminently possessed of the writer's 
gift. He was content for himself in 
this idea of achievement, and he ad- 
vanced steadily year by year. 

December, 1881, he wrote Howells 
from Munich: "One item in the Ameri- 
can Register to-day has given us great 
pain and anxiety, it is to the effect that 
you are very ill with a nervous disease 
brought on by overwork. It comes to 
us when we are in a little trouble, and 
has not made our day any brighter. 
My second thought, after sympathy for 
[101] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
you in your suffering, was that the novel 
which was to be done by January 1st is 
not yet finished, and that will add to 
your worry and depression of spirits. It 
seems a pity now that you did not quit 
work last summer and come over here 
to finish your story. I wish you were h^re 
now, for this part of Europe is certainly 
good for nervous complaints; indeed any 
part of Europe is more soothing than 
America, and I hope you will carry out 
your plan of coming as soon as possible. 
Perhaps it will be a little relief to you to 
know that other people have trials also, 
and that little in this world goes as 
smoothly as we plan it. Else I should 
be writing you now from sunny Palermo, 
and not from cloudy Munich, where we 
[102] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

are having a warmish, rainy December, 
and no snow yet. I came abroad to es- 
cape our winter and find some sunny re- 
treat where Mrs. Warner and I could take 
it easy and perhaps write a little. The 
doctor thoifght Spain would not suit for 
tbe winter, so I planned for south of 
France, Italy, and Sicily. We went to 
Avignon, Nimes, and Montpellier. We 
were a month in lovejy Provence and 
Langueddc, with roses galore; the climate 
not too warm, and suited my throat 
exactly. We have here the best music 
in the world, very good friends, and 
a good doctor. We have got a place 
in an excellent German family. I was 
quite in the spirit of writing in Mont- 
pellier, and wrote for the Council and 
[103] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

Christian Union — some romantic Proven- 
9al stuff. I want to do some work this 
winter if I can find a genial place, but I 
cannot unless my anxiety about Mrs. 
Warner is removed. She sends her love 
to you both, and you know I do. . . . 
There is not much good in the world ex- 
cept friends." 

He wrote again from Sicily in April, 
1882: "I was three weeks in Capri, some 
time at Amalfi, and now over a month 
in Sicily. Heaven is pretty near the hill 
of Taormina, with great Etna dominat- 
ing the scene. You never saw anything so 
enchanting. We have been nearly a week 
at this old, desolate, interesting Syra- 
cuse. This morning we punted up the 
swift Anapo, and pulled up the papyrus, 
[ 104 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

on which the Greeks wrote their immortal 
remarks about goats and pretty shep- 
herdesses, Theocritus created the at- 
mosphere of all this coast for me. I 
sailed to-day onvthp pool and looked thirty 
feet into its clear waters, into which 
Cyane was changed when she opposed 
the transfer of Proserpine to Hades by 
Pluto — it was down this hole that he went 
to his own place with the enchanting girl. 
But I am not going to tell you about the 
enchantments of Syracuse. You must 
come here. . • . I just have the very 
sad news of dear Longfellow's death; 
since I saw him last summer I have felt 
that it might occur at any time, but the 
loss of a man so noble is none the less 
great. . • /' 

[ 105 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

The Life of Washington Irving had 
been followed by the same flow of literary- 
work as usual, but the trend of Warner's 
mind was becoming more and more, not 
social, that could scarcely be possible, but 
in modern phrase, sociological. For a 
while he was kept in the same traces where 
work multiplied continually. "The Life 
of Captain John Smith sometime Gov- 
ernor of Virginia and Admiral of New 
England: a Studj^ of his life and writ- 
ings," came first. The chief contribu- 
tion to Warner's biography in this book 
is to be gathered from the preface, where 
he gives some idea of the unexpected 
labour necessary to accomplish it. "When 
I consented," he says, "to prepare this 
volume ... I did not anticipate the 
[106] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

seriousness of the task. ... If the 
hfe of Smith was to be written, an effort 
should be made to state the truth and to 
disentangle the career of the adventurer 
from the fables and misrepresentations 
that have clustered about it. . . . If 
he was always and uniformly untrust- 
worthy it would be less perplexing to fol- 
low him, but his liability to tell the truth 
when vanity or prejudice does not inter- 
fere is annoying to the careful student." 
Another book of European travel, 
called "A Roundabout Journey," was 
published in 1883. He leaves Paris as 
we all like to do when we must leave it 
at all, in a November fog. "At night 
the door of the car opened at Dijon. The 
four simple words then spoken by the 
[107] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

ticket-taker, 'Billets s'il vous plait/ so 
deluged the apartment with garlic that 
we had to open all the windows. If he 
had added another solid word, I thi^k we 
should have been compelled to jtimp out 
of the car." Mr. Warner found Avignon 
as ever delightful. "We were come," he 
says, "to a land where statues can sit 
out of doors with comfort in winter." 
He goes to the extraordinary old city 
of Aigues-Mortes on the southern coast 
and on, true to his "Roundabout Jour- 
ney," through Orvieto and other old Ital- 
ian cities to Sicily, really resting in ex- 
quisite Taormina and writing of it as no 
one else has done except George Wood- 
berry in his unrivalled monograph, or 
possibly some of the great French au- 
[ 108 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

thors. In recommending the climate of 
Syracuse his guide referred to an Amer- 
ican lady who recovered her health there. 
"She bought a cow," he remarked, "got 
well in - a few weeks, went back to 
America, and married a species of poet." 
Warner thinks that "a milk diet and 
union with a species of poet is better than 
being converted into a fountain." 

He wrote again to Mr. Howells, July, 
1883, fronl" Hartford: ". . . The 
Tribune represents you as moving about 
the shady sides of Boston streets, dodging 
the sun and public honour. If you are 
where the Tribune pretends you are, do 
for heaven's sake tell me how you are 
and how the rest of the family thrive. I 
would welcome you back with all my 
[109] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
heart if I felt sure you were here. For 
I have a great desire to see you. Just 
now I am tied here. Hawley, Clark, and 
Hubbard of our court are in Europe. 
We are likely to be kept here till the mid- 
dle of September. But I am very well, 
free from malaria, and hard at work. 
. • • I made a Virginian trip in Jime." 
Again in December he writes: ''God bless 
you and everybody in your house this 
Christmas time. ... I am to be in 
New York for two or three weeks. I've 
got to make some lectures for Princeton 
and Cornell." 

Lectures from him were now in con- 
stant demand. He was asked to take 
part in the Social Science Congress, at 
the Ashfield Dinner and other annual and 
[110] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
patriotic meetings. He always spoke as he 
wrote, apparently with extraordinary ease, 
until others were led to forget that such 
expenditure of nervous energy cannot be 
given by any human being without a 
corresponding sense of loss. He found 
at last that continued speaking increased 
a dehcacy of the throat which gradually 
became chronic, and he was thus forced 
to pass a part of every winter in a milder 
climate than that of New England. 
The meetings of the Social Science Con- 
gress interested him deeply. The re- 
ports on the condition of prisons and 
criminals read at these meetings espe- 
cially arrested his attention. His mind 
and heart were finally given to the sub- 
ject of the criminal with an intensity 

[111] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
which never slackened. For fifteen years 
until his death he lost no opportunity, and 
sought to make many an occasion, to 
speak and write upon this subject. 

"Will you come and lecture for us this 
winter," said a friend to him who lived 
in one of our cultivated and intelligent 
New England cities. "Yes," said War- 
ner, "I will go if you will let me speak 
upon prisons. I haven't the time to talk 
upon any other subject." His audiences 
wished to hear him lecture upon litera- 
ture; they wanted his wit and humour to 
play over the books he knew so well and 
could speak of with an instructed mind; 
but he felt himself called now in another 
direction. He visited many prisons and 
passed six weeks once with Mr. Brock- 
[112] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
way at Elmira Reformatory, going there 
for unexpected visits and consultations 
with his friend, the superintendent, as he 
found the time. Nevertheless, in the 
summer of 1885 he visited the chief water- 
ing places of America and wrote a de- 
scription of them, weaving an interest- 
ing story called "Their Pilgrimage" from 
his experiences. Beginning early in the 
season at Fortress Monroe, the autumn 
finds him at the White Moimtains and 
Lenox. He makes notes at Cape May, 
Atlantic City, the Catskills, Newport, 
and other vacation resorts. It is a charm- 
ing but keen report by a trained observer 
of our people at their summer amuse- 
ments and dissipations. "In the car for 
Niagara," he wrote, "was an Englishman 
[113] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
of the receptive, guileless, thin type, in- 
quisitive and overflowing with approval 
of everything American, a type which has 
now become one of the common features 
of travel in this country. . . . He 
was accompanied by his wife, a stout 
resolute matron in heavy boots, a sensible 
stuff gown, with a lot of cotton lace 
fudged about her neck, and a broad- 
brimmed hat with a vegetable garden on 
top. The little man was always in pur- 
suit of information, in his guide-book or 
from his fellow-passengers, and whenever 
he obtained any he invariably repeated it 
to his wife, who said, 'Fancy!' and 'Now 
really!' in a rising inflection that ex- 
pressed surprise and expectation. The 
conceited American, who commonly draws 
[ 114 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

himself into a shell when he travels, 
and affects indifference, seems to be los- 
ing all natural curiosity, receptivity, and 
the power of observation, is pretty cer- 
tain to undervalue the intelligence of 
this class of English travellers, and get 
amusement out of their peculiarities in- 
stead of learning from them how to make 
every day of life interesting. Even 
King, who, besides his national crust of 
exclusiveness, was to-day wrapped in the 
gloom of Irene's letter, was gradually 
drawn to these simple, unpretending peo- 
ple. He took for granted their igno- 
rance of America — ignorance of America 
being one of the branches taught in the 
English schools — and he soon discovered 
that they were citizens of the world. 
[115] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

They not only knew the Continent very 
well, but they had spent a winter in 
Egypt, lived a year in India and seen 
something of China and much of Japan. 
Although they had been scarcely a fort- 
night in the United States, King doubted 
if there were ten women in the State of 
New York, not professional teachers, who 
knew as much of the flora of the country 
as this plain- featured, rich-voiced woman. 
They called King's attention to a great- 
many features of the landscape he had 
never noticed before, and asked him a 
great many questions about farming, 
stock, and wages that he could not answer. 
It appeared that Mr. Stanley Stubbs, 
Stoke-Cruden — for that was the name 
and address of the present discoverers of 
[ 116 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

America — ^had a herd of short-horns, and 
that Mrs. Stubbs was even more familiar 
with the herd-book than her husband. 
But before the fact had enabled King to 
settle the question of his new acquaint- 
ance satisfactorily to himself, Mrs. 
Stubbs upset his estimate by quoting 
Tennyson. 'Your English poet is very 
much read here,' King said, by way of 
being agreeable. 'So we have heard,' re- 
plied Mrs. Stubbs. 'Mr. Stubbs reads 
Tennyson beautifully. He has thought 
of giving some readings while we are 
here. We have been told that the Amer- 
icans are very fond of readings.' 

" 'Yes,' said King, 'they are devoted 
to them, especially readings by English- 
men in their native tongue. There is a 
[117] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

great rage now for everything English; 
at Newport hardly anything else is 
spoken/ 

"Mrs. Stubbs looked for a moment as 
if this might be an American joke; but 
there was no smile upon King's face, and 
she only said: 'Fancy! You must make 
a note of Newport, dear. That is one 
of the places we must see. Of course, 
Mr. Stubbs has never read in public, you 
know. But I suppose that would make 
no difference, the Americans are so kind 
and so appreciative.' 

" 'Not the least diiFerence,' rephed 
King. 'They are used to it.' 

" 'It is a wonderful country,' said Mr. 
Stubbs." 

We cannot give further quotations 
[118] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

from this pretty story. This bit will give 
an idea of the light wit and keen observa- 
tion with which it is filled, making it a 
book for summer reading of a pattern 
seldom indeed to be found. It has the 
writer's charming characteristics, with 
passages here and there which Thackeray 
and again Irving would not be sorry to 
call their own. 

The winter of 1885, in spite of War- 
ner's various literary engagements, found 
him steadily at work in his heart upon 
the prison interests. In April he printed 
a paper called "A Study of Prison Man- 
agement," from which, being lost to sight 
at present in the pages of an old number 
of The North American Review, we must 
print extracts if we faithfully represent 
[119] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

the occupations of Warner's mind and 
life: 

"Our failure," he says, "in the handling 
of criminals with reference to their ref- 
ormation, and the proportionate security 
of society and decrease of taxation, is 
due largely to the fact that we have con- 
sidered the problem as physical, and not 
psychological. The effort has been to 
improve prisons and the physical condi- 
tion and environment of prisoners. This 
eif ort has been directed by sentiment, 
rather than upon principles of economy 
and a study of himian nature. It has 
been assimaed that if convicts were 
treated with more kindness, if they were 
lodged in prisons well warmed and well 
ventilated, light and airy, in cells more 
[120] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

roomy and comfortable; if they had bet- 
ter food and more privileges (graduated 
on good deportment), they would be 
more likely to reform and to lead honest 
lives after their discharge. 

^'This movement was dictated by phil- 
anthropic motives, and I am far from 
saying that it is all wrong. But it has 
not produced the results that were ex- 
pected; and it seems to me that the revolt 
in the public mind against what is called 
the ^coddling' system is justified by facts 
and results. The modern model prison 
is a costly and architecturally imposing 
structure; it is safer to lodge in and 
freer from odours than most hotels; its 
cells are well warmed, lighted with gas, 
and comfortable; it has a better dietary 
[121] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

than most of its inmates are accustomed 
to; it has bath-rooms, a library, often 
large and well selected; an admirably- 
arranged hospital; a cheerful chapel, 
garnished with frescoes and improving 
texts ; there are Sunday services and Sun- 
day-schools; there is a chaplain who visits 
the prisoners to distribute books and 
tracts, and converse on religious topics; 
there are lectures and readings and occa- 
sional musical concerts by the best tal- 
ent; sometimes holidays are given; there 
are extra dinners on Thanksgiving day, 
Christmas day, and the Fom-th of July, 
when the delicacies of the season stimu- 
late the holiday and patriotic sentiments; 
and in most State prisons a man may 
earn a considerable abatement of his sen- 
tence by good behaviour. . . . 
[ 122 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

"The reform in prison construction 
and management was very much needed, 
and I am not anxious now to express an 
opinion whether or not it has gone too 
far. But it must be noted that along 
with this movement has grown up a sickly 
sentimentality about criminals which has 
gone altogether too far, and which, un- 
der the guise of 'humanity' and philan- 
thropy, confounds all moral distinctions. 
The mawkish sympathy of good and 
soft-hearted women with the most de- 
graded and persistent criminals of the 
male sex is one of the signs of an 
unhealthy public sentiment. A self- 
respecting murderer is obliged to write 
upon his cards 'no flowers.' I think it 
will not be denied that our civilisation, 
which has considerably raised the average 
[ 123 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
of human life, tends to foster and in- 
crease the number of weaklings, incom- 
petents, and criminally inclined. Un- 
systematic charity increases pauperism, 
and unphilosophical leniency toward the 
criminal classes increases that class. 

"It seems to me that we have either 
gone too far, or we have not gone far 
enough. If oiu- treatment of the incom- 
petent and vicious is to keep pace with 
oiu* general civilisation, we must resort 
to more radical measures. The plan of 
systematised charity, which cultivates in- 
dependence instead of dependence, and 
the increased attention given to the very 
young children who by their situation 
and inheritance are criminally inclined, 
are steps in the right direction. Proba- 
[124] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

bly it will be more and more evident that 
it is the best economy for the State to 
spend money liberally on those who are 
liable to lecome dependents and crim- 
inals. If the State were to show as 
much energy in this direction as it does 
in police supervision and the capture and 
conviction of criminals, it is certain that 
a marked improvement would be felt in 
society within a generation. . . . 

"My proposition is that there is very 
little difference between our worst State 
prisons and our best in the effect pro- 
duced upon convicts as to reformation or 
a reduction of the criminal class. The 
State prison at Wethersfield, Conn., is 
one of the old type. It is an old and 
ramshackle establishment, patched up 
[125] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

from time to time, and altogether a 
gloomy and depressing place. It is, 
however, well managed ; it is made to pay- 
about its running expenses; and many of 
the modern alleviations of prison life are 
applied there — a library, occasional en- 
tertainments, a diminution of time of sen- 
tence for good conduct, and so on, what- 
ever such a place is capable of in the way 
of comfort consistent with the system. 
But the inmates are the most discourag- 
ing feature of the exhibition. They are 
in appearance depressed, degraded, down- 
looking, physically sluggish, mentally 
and morally tending to more and more 
degradation. There is no hope or sug- 
gestion of improvement in them. The 
disciphne is good, and the men earn time 
[ 126 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

by good conduct, but there are no evi- 
dences that the alleviations (which take 
from the former terrors of prison life) 
are working the least moral change. It 
is a most depressing and dispiriting sight. 
"Would any change for the better be 
wrought if the environment were more 
cheerful? The State prison at Cranston, 
R. I., is a new, handsome, granite build- 
ing, with the modern improvements. 
Perfectly lighted and ventilated, with 
roomy cells, a common messroom, an ad- 
mirable hospital, a more than usually 
varied dietary, with a library, and all the 
privileges that humanity can suggest as 
consistent with discipline and security, it 
is as little gloomy and depressing as a 
State prison well can be. Having occa- 
[127] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

sion recently to look into this matter offi- 
cially, I confess that I expected to find 
at Cranston a very different state of 
affairs as to the convicts from that exist- 
ing at Wethersfield. The improved 
physical conditions ought to show some 
moral and physical upHft in the men. I 
was totally disappointed. Here were 
the same hang-dog, depressed, hopeless, 
heavy lot of convicts. The two prisons 
might change inmates, and no visitor 
would know the difference. You might 
expect just as little reformation in one 
as in the other. We are not considering 
now any question of sentiment or human- 
ity; and the conclusion was forced upon 
me that, so far as the real interests of 
society are concerned, nothing is gained 
[128] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

by converting prisons into comfortable 
hotels- 

"Since we have abolished punishments, 
and are not ready to take any radical 
steps for reformation, it would be better 
to make prison life so hard that detention 
would be a punishment in itself. The 
men should earn their living at hard 
labour, and be made to feel the weight of 
their transgressions. If professional and 
confirmed criminals, men who declare by 
undergoing second conviction for a fel- 
ony that they have made preying upon 
society their business, who belong, in 
short, to a pretty well-defined criminal 
class, cannot be removed altogether from 
troubling this world, they ought to be 
locked up permanently and made to earn 
[129] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
their living. They are of no sort of use 
in the world, and are an expense and a 
danger to society. The rosewater treat- 
ment has no effect on this class, as a 
rule. Holidays, occasional fine dinners, 
concerts, lectures, flowers — we are going 
ridiculously far in this direction, unless 
we add a radical something to this sort 
of treatment that will touch the life of 
the man, and tend to change his nature 
and inclination. . . • 

"Can anything better be done with men 
convicted of State-prison offences? It 
is with the hope of throwing some light 
on this question that I wish to give a 
brief and informal account of what is go- 
ing on in the Reformatory of Elmira, 
N. Y., under the superintendency of Mr. 
[130] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

Z. R. Brockway. Here is an experiment 
in the personal treatment of convicts, 
unique, so far as I know, in the world; 
and I suppose it is an open question 
whether anybody except Mr. Brockway 
could carry it on. It is well to say, by 
way of preliminary, that the theory of 
indeterminate sentences, held by Mr. 
Brockway and other prison reformers, 
has been by many regarded as impracti- 
cable of operation, for want of a tribunal 
to say when a man is sufficiently re- 
formed for his sentence to terminate. 
For the role of hypocrisy is one of the 
easiest for a rogue to play. 

''The Elmira Reformatory, which cost 
more than it should (being built in New 
York), is a somewhat pretentious build- 
[131] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

ing, situated on a commanding eminence. 
It need not be particularly described, fur- 
ther than to say that in point of arrange- 
ment, light, air, roominess, ventilation, 
etc., it conforms to modern notions. . . . 
What distinguishes it, however, is that 
it is provided with school-rooms sufficient 
for the accommodation of all its inmates. 
And it is, as we shall see, a great edu- 
cational establishment, the entrance to 
which is through the door of crime. The 
keynote of it is compulsory education. 
The qualifications for admission to it are 
that the man convicted of a State-prison 
oif ence shall be between the ages of six- 
teen and thirty, and that he has not been 
in State prison before. In his discretion 
any judge in the State may send a con- 
[132] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
vict of this description to Elmira. He 
is sentenced to the Reformatory subject 
to the rules of that institution, not for a 
definite term; but he cannot be detained 
there longer than the maximum for which 
he might have been sentenced under the 
law. For instance, if for burglary he 
might have been sentenced to State prison 
for ten years, he may be held at Elmira 
for ten years; but he may, in the discre- 
tion of the board of managers, who are 
appointed by the Governor, be discharged 
in one year. The institution is practi- 
cally managed by the superintendent. 
The discharges are made only by the 
board, who consider the man's record in 
the prison, and the probabilities, from all 
the evidence concerning him, that he will 
[133] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

behave if set at liberty. He must have 
a perfect record before the board con- 
sider his case; and, besides this, the board 
must have confidence in his will and abil- 
ity to live up to it. 
• •••••• 

"The process of his release is this: If 
he is reported perfect in three things — 
labour, school, and conduct — for each of 
which three marks are required each 
month, making nine in all, for six months, 
he is advanced to the first grade. If he 
remains perfect in the first grade for six 
months more, gaining nine good marks 
each month, he may then, at the discre- 
tion of the managers, be sent out on his 
parole. But he is not released on parole 
until a place is found for him in which 
[134] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

he can get employment and earn his 
living. If his friends cannot find a place 
for him, or he will not be received back into 
his former employment, if he had any, 
the institution places him by means of 
correspondence. On parole he must re- 
port his conduct and condition every 
month to the superintendent, and this re- 
port must be indorsed by some one of 
known character. If the paroled contin- 
ues to behave himself for six months, he 
receives his final discharge; if he back- 
slides, he is rearrested, brought back, and 
must begin over again. . . . 

"It will be seen from this slight sketch 

that it is not an easy matter to get out 

of the Elmira Reformatory before the 

expiration of the maximum sentence. 

[135] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

Three things are required — perfect con- 
duct, perfect diligence, and willingness in 
labour — ^with as good progress in school 
as the capacity of the man admits. . . • 
The most striking thing about the insti- 
tution is the cultivation of individual re- 
sponsibility; a man's progress depends 
upon himself. The education is strictly 
compulsory. Such a motive was never 
before given men to study, for release 
depends upon dihgence and understand- 
ing of the matter in hand. . . . 

"Never was compulsory education so 
completely applied. But it must be con- 
fessed, in this case, that the class had 
got thoroughly interested in the subject. 
The expression of their faces was that 
of aroused intelligence. Nothing seemed 
[1361 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

lost on the majority of them; the finest 
points made by Socrates, his searching 
moral distinctions, his humour, you could 
see were taken instantly, by the expres- 
sion of their faces. The discussions and 
the essays in this class show a most re- 
markable grasp, subtlety, penetration, 
and power of drawing fine moral dis- 
tinctions; and the vigour and fitness of 
the language in which they are couched 
are not the least notable part of the 
display. The previous Sunday there had 
been a lively discussion of the question, 
*Is Honesty the best Policy?' The study 
of the morality of Socrates led the class 
naturally, and by their request, to a study 
of the morality of Jesus and the New 
Testament, though not at all as a re- 
[ 137 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

ligious inquiry; and thus a result was 
reached in moral investigation that a 
clergyman, beginning at the other end, 
probably never could have brought this 
mixed and abnormal class to attempt will- 
ingly. For these men are not only crim- 
inals, warped and prejudiced against any 
religious teaching, but they are of all sects 
by inheritance, perhaps half the number 
Catholics, and fifty of them Hebrews. 
Among men that have abandoned all prac- 
tice of religion it would be perfectly easy 
to stir up a bitter theological feeling. 
The lecture on the second Sunday I was 
present was introductory on the develop- 
ment of religions, preparatory to such a 
study of the New Testament morality 
as had been given to that of Socrates. 
[138] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

Before I quit this Sunday audience, I 
ought to say that, when the six hun- 
dred are assembled it is one of the most 
alert and quickly responsive I have ever 
seen. . . ." 

Warner's persuasion that reform in 
methods for dealing with the criminal 
cannot long be delayed saved him from 
restless effort. He did what he could. 
His pen was heated with fresh fire, his 
heart was filled with new longing. He 
grasped with fervour the first genuine 
fundamental effort the world has seen 
in the right direction; — that made on 
the ground of indeterminate sentence. 
Warner learned at the Social Science 
Congress that Mr. Brockway, in hope of 
being granted indeterminate sentence for 
r 139 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
Elmira, was beginning experiments there 
with rather more men than he believed 
well for the experiments but with a prom- 
ise, miderstood, of hmiting the nmnber 
to six himdred. This promise was not 
kept, nor was absolutely indeterminate 
sentence granted, but in face of all diffi- 
culties the work proceded as we have seen. 
He saw cabals growing against the re- 
former; he watched the effect of general 
ignorance played upon by the enemies of 
reform, and he lived to see Mr. Brockway 
overthrown by the pohticians of New 
York. 

Yet who shall say that the experiment 
has failed? In the perspective afforded 
by these very few years we see that fail- 
ure is impossible. New men, younger 
[140] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

men, will offer themselves, and women, 
too, though late, will begin to under- 
stand what reform means in behalf of the 
criminal. 

In the year 1886 Warner renewed his 
work by printing two popular papers 
upon the subject in diiferent magazines. 
The first appeared in the Arena in Janu- 
ary. This paper had been delivered pre- 
viously as an address before the Social 
Science Congress and may be found in 
their archives. The second appeared in 
Harper's Monthly Magazine in Febru- 
ary of that year, the editor, Mr. Alden, 
having always shown himself sympathetic 
with true advance in humanitarian direc- 
tions. Warner wrote : 

"Is there any way, theoretically, that 
[141] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

promises to change the confirmed crim- 
inal? Is there any evidence that this 
theoretical way will work practically? 
Yes. I firmly believe there is a way, and 
there is an example. That remedy, that 
way, is education, but education under 
proper conditions. And by education I 
do not mean the teaching of knowledges, 
the imparting of information, learning 
from books or any other soiu-ce. I mean 
education in the original signification of 
the word; that is, discipline, the develop- 
ment of unknown, unused powers, the 
restoration of lost powers — in short, a 
training and bringing out of all the 
powers and faculties that go to make 
up a man, sound in mind, in morals, in 
body. 

[142] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

"If you propose to reform a criminal, 
improved physical conditions are not 
enough. For such a man, whose moral 
nature is as unstable as water, no tem- 
porary or sentimental rehgious excite- 
ment will avail to put his feet on a rock 
where he can stand against temptation. A 
man coarse in fibre, weak in will, an easy 
prey to vice, can be excited, can be melted 
into tears, will fall into a mush of repent- 
ance, but the mood will probably only be 
a passing sentiment. . . . 

"Let us see how discipline, applied to 
the body, to the mind, and to the moral 
sense ought to work upon the man — how, 
in fact, it has worked in one institution 
with which we are familiar. I do not 
refer to this institution for the sake of 
[143] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

saying anything of the tact and skill of 
its manager, but to call your attention to 
the philosophic basis upon which his ef- 
fort rests. For it is very important that 
the fact should be recognised that a prin- 
ciple is involved in the attempt at the 
Elmira Reformatory which is entirely in- 
dependent of the adaptability of its man- 
ager to deal with men. Of course much 
depends upon the man in any system 
or institution. In teaching deaf-mutes 
there is a great difference in the power 
of men to awaken inert faculties. We 
may have a good system of municipal 
government the working of which may 
be defeated by a bad or incompetent 
mayor, or we may have a defective sys- 
tem which may yield fair results with a 
[144] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
competent, honest executive; but it re- 
mains true that a good system will eventu- 
ally give the best results. . • . 

"In order to reform any person ad- 
dicted to evil living, an adequate motive 
must be offered. Under the method de- 
scribed the powerful motive is the desire 
of regaining liberty. This would seem 
enough, but it is not always sufficient to 
arouse ambition in a sluggish nature, 
especially when the period of incarcera- 
tion is fixed and is short. This motive, 
then, has to be supplemented by others. 
A way must be found to arouse the slug- 
gish body, and interest the dormant mind. 
• It is sometimes long before this way can 
be discovered. These ruined natures 
have often very little that can be ap- 
[145] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

pealed to successfully. But I believe 
there is in most men and women, however 
degraded, the seed of a better life. The 
first step will probably be the awakening 
of an interest in something outside them- 
selves; not a purpose of change, but sim- 
ply an interest. It may be a desire to 
learn the alphabet, or an awakened taste 
for reading, or a little inclination to know 
something. It may be a pride in per- 
sonal appearance, or a wish to get com- 
mendation for good behaviour, or a 
dawning sense of the agreeableness of 
order, neatness, cleanliness. Or it may 
be some pleasure in a discovered power 
to do well a piece of work. This inter- 
est, once aroused, can be stimulated by 
various incitements, slight rewards of 
[ 146 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
promotion, the fear of social degrada- 
tion; and this path of doing well will be- 
come powerfully attractive when it is seen 
to be the path, and the only one, to lib- 
erty. But this interest in any form, with 
even the prize of liberation, cannot be 
depended on to last. The will of the 
criminal is weak and vacillating. He can- 
not be depended on, he cannot depend 
upon himself, for continuance. He may 
fail and fall again and again. The only 
remedy in his case — and it is the common 
case — is to keep him at it, keep him try- 
ing, until a habit is formed, until his will 
is strengthened, until, in fact, it is men- 
tally and physically just as easy for him 
to live a normal, healthful life as it was 
to live a disorderly life. . . . 
[ 14^^ ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

"The important thing, as necessary in 
this system to getting out of confinement 
as to becoming a man, is the formation 
of habit. And here is where the notion 
of an indeterminate sentence comes in as 
the only condition of forming a fixed 
habit. 

"An indeterminate sentence is the sen- 
tence of a convict to confinement until in 
the judgment of some tribunal he is fit to 
go out into society again, until it is evi- 
dent that he is likely to be law-abiding. 
If a person is determined upon a crim- 
inal life, the best thing that can be done 
for him and for society is to confine him 
where he can do no mischief, and where 
his labour will pay for his keeping, so that 
he may not be an expense to society nor 
[ 14^8 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

a terror to it. And, logically, he should 
be confined until there is good reason to 
believe that he will be a self-supporting, 
law-abiding member of the community. 
Now the difficulty heretofore has been to 
determine when a person might safely be 
released on an indeterminate sentence. 
Under the present prison system, if re- 
lease depended simply on good behaviour, 
on external observance of rules, most 
criminals are shrewd enough to behave 
admirably, and to even offer evidence of 
Christian conversion, in order to get re- 
lease. Where is there a tribunal that 
could pass upon his character? The El- 
mira system compels a person literally to 
work out his own salvation. It will 
take some men a longer and some men a 
[149] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
shorter time to do it, that is, to acquire 
such a habit that for a given period they 
can stand perfect in study, in work, in 
conduct. Under our present rule of de- 
terminate sentences there are many incor- 
rigible cases. Probably there are some 
natures incapable of being changed to 
anything better. Let such stay where 
they can pay for their living and not 
injure society. But it is difficult to say 
of any man that he canndt be reached 
and touched by discipline, physical, men- 
tal, and moral, for a long time and con- 
tinuous; that it is impossible to drill him, 
in years of effort, into a habit of decent 
living and a liking for an orderly life. 
It is impossible, psychologically and 
physiologically, for a person to obey rigid 
[150] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

rules of order and decency, to be drilled 
in mental exercises, to be subject to super- 
vision for intelligent and attentive labour, 
for a considerable length of time, and not 
form new habits, not be changed sensibly 
and probably radically. It may be in 
one year, it may be in ten years, but ulti- 
mately habits will be formed, and the man 
cannot, without a greater or less effort, 
be what he was before he was subjected 
to this process. . . .'' 

Warner had an excellent example in 
Dickens to encourage him to believe that 
the pen has power even in these unwonted 
paths. Dickens's work for Newgate 
prison has never been questioned, and at 
that time "interest was shown in the pris- 
oner," Dickens says, ''but no sympathy." 
[ 151 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

The world has progressed; yet, consider- 
ing the need, it moves slowly. May it 
not be hoped that all who loved Charles 
Dudley Warner and who cared for his 
life and work in any degree will be quick- 
ened to forward this interest of his — 
that it may become theirs, since it is for 
humanity as well as for his memory. We 
are reminded in this of the unforgetable 
words of Fenelon where he speaks of per- 
sonal grief and says: "II faut passer a 
rhumanite cet attendrissement sur soi." 



[152] 



IV 

During the winter of 1877 Warner had 
taken his first brief glimpse of Mexico, 
but it was not until after later visits in 
1888 that he published a book containing 
much that was new upon a country which 
possessed great fascination for him. He 
began also to make notes on California, al- 
though his book "Our Italy" was not fully 
written until later. Of Mexico he was 
never tired and was always ready after 
this first glimpse to start off again when 
he could find an agreeable companion, if 
only for a month or two. The colour, the 
climate, the people, all delighted him, and 
the constant surprises. Writing there 
from a remote Indian village, Zinzunzan, 
[153] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

he says: "To these poor savages, Philip 
II. made a gift that any monarch or any 
city might envy." Here in a decaying 
church of ancient splendour is to be found 
The Entombment, by Titian. "It seems 
incredible," he continues, "that a work of 
this value should be comparatively un- 
known, and that it should be found in a 
remote Indian village in Mexico. But 
the evidence that it is by Titian is strong. 
. • . We could not but be profoundly 
impressed." 

In 1888 Warner seems to have pub- 
lished the results of several brief jour- 
neys in foregoing years in a book called 
"On Horseback." Virginia, North Caro- 
lina, and Tennessee were all delightfully 
reviewed. "If the travellers had known," 
[154] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

he says, "the capacities and resources of 
the country they would not have started 
without a supply train, or the establish- 
ment of bases of provisions in advance." 
They did not have a very easy time, these 
travellers on a horseback tour, but ease 
was not what they started for, so they 
kept on. Speaking of one town where 
the jail was shut up, Warner says: "It 
is not much use to try to run a jail with- 
out liquor." 

Mr. Alden, of Harper's Magazine, pro- 
posed to Mr. Warner in 1885 that he 
should make an extended journey South 
and West and report upon the condition 
of the States which were less generally 
known and less closely affiliated than was 
desirable with the North and East. The 
[155] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
book which was the result of observations 
made upon this tour contains a prefatory 
note to his friend the editor, in which he 
says: ''The object was not to present a 
comprehensive account of the country 
south and west, but to note certain rep- 
resentative developments, tendencies, and 
dispositions, the communication of which 
would lead to a better imderstanding be- 
tween different sections. The strongest 
impression produced upon the writer in 
making these studies was that the pros- 
perous life of the Union depends upon 
the life and dignity of the individual 
States.'' 

Warner fell in love with New Orleans 
at first sight. Among his friends there 
he met a lady who said (only what sev- 
[156] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

eral others said in substance), "We are 
going to get more out of this war than 
you at the North, because we suffered 
more." ''South and West" is a book of 
permanent value to patriotic Americans, 
and although changes have gone forward 
steadily since the day it was written its 
value and interest have scarcely lessened. 
It is a great temptation to quote from 
it; indeed it seems unfair not to repre- 
sent the many months of Warner's life 
which were absorbed in the labour of ob- 
serving and travelling and recording, in 
order to make this book, but space is lack- 
ing. Bound in the same volume is a 
valuable study of Canada. The writer 
heard him say some years after this book 
("South and West") was published that 
[157] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

he always felt sorry that he had included 
Canada. That was a study by itself and 
overweighted the book, at the same time 
being lost there. It stands, wherever it 
is found, as a valuable piece of work, and 
if Warner had lived would have shown 
him possessed of knowledge such as a 
real statesman should possess, knowledge 
which showed him ready for any public 
position. 

We find a letter to his old friend Wirt 
Dexter, written from New York, March, 
1889, saying: "I am delighted that you 
are able to sit up and take a little gruel, 
and be healthfully indignant over the low 
plane on which Harrison has started. 
His idea seems to be to reward all the 
[158] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

newspapers and army boys who helped 
nominate and elect him. I wonder if 
there are no gentlemen in this country 
who could represent us abroad, or whether 
a gentleman could not represent us. 

"I have been scratching away on my 
serial, which they are now calling a novel, 
and have got to a burning point where I 
want to look about a little. So I am go- 
ing down to Washington to-morrow for 
a couple of weeks. I go for some local 
colour, but I shall steer clear of the per- 
sons in office and those who want to be 
in. I cannot understand the policy of 
the Republican party. If it really wants 
a united Union, why don't it act as if the 
South were in the Union. Not a South- 
ern man yet appointed anywhere. And 
[159] 




CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

what a good Attorney-General John 
Mason Brown would have made. You 
haven't got another Fuller, have you, to 

go in Justice 's place?" 

The renewal of his early friendship 
with Wirt Dexter happened on his first 
visit to Chicago after an interval of 
twenty years or more. Each of them 
had been absorbed in their successful work 
and they had never met; and Warner 
seized his earliest opportunity to go to 
Mr. Dexter's house. The great lawyer 
was sitting on his piazza when Warner 
came up the steps and rang the bell; but 
both had changed and they did not recog- 
nise each other. Mrs. Dexter received 
her guest w^armly and sent for her hus- 
band. When he entered the room War- 
[160] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

ner had the advantage, and going quietly; 
up and taking him by the hand said (re- 
membering their old transaction in house- 
hold goods) : "Wirt, did you ever pay me 
for that furniture?" A fine burst of 
laughter followed this unexpected sally, 
and the two friends rejoiced to find each 
other really imchanged. 

Later he wrote to Mr. Dexter from 
Munich, September, 1891: 

"My dear, dear friend : I received your 
note when I was in Marienbad, and should 
at once have replied, but I got there with 
an attack of rheumatism in my right arm, 
which has incapacitated me from writing. 
I am now, after five weeks, much better 
and speedily on the way to be all right, 
[161] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

but my head is still too uncertain for any- 
thing but a short note. We have just 
been two weeks in Meran, in Tyrol, about 
the loveliest place the Lord ever made, 
and full of grapes and figs. . . . We 
expect to be at home before December 1. 
I am not sorry to go, though I know I 
shall want at once to flee from the win- 
ter of New England. . . . The sad- 
dest thing of all the things is Lowell's 
death. Boston is fast ceasing to be Bos- 
ton. 

''Ever aff*ectionately yours." 

It was close upon the beginning of the 

last decade of Warner's life, 1890, that 

he conceived the idea of writing a novel, 

the first hint of which we find in his let- 

[162] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
ter to Wirt Dexter. He was then sixty- 
years old and had occupied himself in a 
different field of letters up to that time; 
nevertheless he undertook, with a boyish 
sense of excitement for a ''new thing," a 
trilogy of novels called, respectively, "A 
Little Journey in the World," "The 
Golden House," and "That Fortune." 
They are all good and interesting stories ; 
"first-rate reading"; though the first is 
by an essayist who has fallen in love with 
a few characters and makes them talk out 
subjects because the subjects interest him. 
"The Golden House" is, however, a de- 
hghtful story without let or hindrance. 
Any one seeking for an interesting novel 
may well read that and its sequel, "That 
Fortune." We need not say that these 
[ 163 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

three novels absorbed the larger part of 
his interest and attention during the years 
he held them in hand. It was 1899 be- 
fore the last, "That Fortune," was pub- 
lished. 

Among the few letters we find of this 
period is one written to Manchester-by- 
Sea, September, 1893, from Hartford. 
. . . ''On my way down I read Miss 
Jewett's last story in the Century. When 
I came home I read it aloud amid laugh- 
ter and tears and with a choking voice 
now and then. How pathetic is happi- 
ness! This is a true New England pic- 
ture. . . . This is a higher truth about 
it. 'The dear sweet thing!' they said, as 
I read on, and found those swift sure 
touches of nature ; meaning the dear sweet 
[164] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

writer. The story, which is not a story 
either, has a wonderful quahty. Give 
my warmest love and fealty to Miss 
Jewett. 

"What a rare visit it was to your high 

perch, with and Miss Cochrane and 

the ever memorable lunch with Dr. 
Holmes and Mr. Howells. It almost 
makes me long to be eighty-four. Do 
you suppose we shall be like that, that wit 
will be born so, and memory so survive? 
It was all delightful, the three days there 
and the wonderful country and the charm- 
ing people, and I never again shall chmb 
that same hill with you and Miss Fearn. 
Such things are not repeated. 

"Lady Edward Fitzmaurice did not 
[ 165 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

come yesterday, but is expected this after- 
noon, any moment now. So I must go 
down and put on my noble manners if I 
can find them. 

"Yours affectionately." 

Meanwhile several small books were 
published made up of papers previously 
printed in Harper's Magazine. In 1884 
he had associated himself with that mag- 
azine, first as editor of the Drawer and 
later of the Study, and kept up the con- 
nection until 1898, two years before his 
death. Between the years 1896 and 
1898, with the assistance of his brother, 
Mr. George Warner, he edited the large 
volumes of the compendium called "The 
World's Best Literature," writing some 
[166] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

of the prefaces and introductions, which 
showed his own matured hterary tastes 
and judgments. This collection really 
represents his own idea of the leaders in 
English letters, which is far from being 
the case with every collection issued un- 
der the segis of a distinguished name. In 
1899 also he had published a book with an 
historical flavour, called "The People for 
Whom Shakespeare Wrote," and this 
book, with the exception of a collection 
of essays, "The Relation of Literature 
to Life," closed the long series of his 
labours. 

"The Relation of Literature to Life" 

carries a peculiar interest apart from style 

and thought when looked at from our 

present standpoint, that of the indi- 

[167] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
yidual and the purpose of his life. The 
autumn is near, but with no touch of 
decadence, only ripeness and calm. The 
close relation of all "genuine enduring 
literature" to himian life is here pointed 
out with the persuasion of a man who 
has lived by the knowledge of an almost 
unacknowledged truth and is now re- 
hearsing it in plain speech. "The most 
remunerative method of studying a litera- 
ture,'' he says, "is to study the people for 
whom it was produced," and illustrations 
of this are drawn by him in a course of 
lectures previously delivered from the 
Greek, French, and English literatures. 
"Enghsh readers can test this," he writes, 
"by taking up their Shakespeare after a 
thorough investigation of the customs, 
[168] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

manners, and popular life of the Eliza- 
bethan period." 

Where else can we turn to find a man 
whose life was frankly devoted to letters, 
always defending his guild and shelter- 
ing the race of literary men behind so 
brave a shield? Other men of letters 
have been proud of their profession and 
content with the high place which some 
of them, presuming for a moment they 
are men of genius, have attained. But 
genius is not to be classified. Charles 
Warner was speaking of the necessity 
of literature and of the lofty eminence 
of the profession apart from individuals. 
He says: "If the world in which you live 
happens to be the world of books, if your 
pursuit is to know what has been done 
[169] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
and said in the world, to the end that 
your own conception of the value of life 
may be enlarged, and that better things 
may be done and said hereafter, this world 
and this pursuit assume supreme impor- 
tance in your mind. But you can in a 
moment place yourself in relations — ^you 
have not to go far, perhaps only to speak 
to your next neighbour — ^where the very 
existence of your world is scarcely rec- 
ognised. • . . You will speedily be 
aware how completely apart from himaan 
life literature is held to be, how few peo- 
ple regard it seriously, as a necessary ele- 
ment in life." He then compares the 
great labours of men of affairs, the build- 
ing of towns and manufactures in in- 
credibly short spaces of time upon lands 
[170] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
where forests grew a few months earlier 
and speaks of the marvellous exhibition 
of energy which has wrought such results. 
He inquires: "Why encounter these diffi- 
culties? The men are not consciously 
philanthropists. • . . They enjoy no 
doubt the feeling of leadership, but they 
embark in their enterprise in order that 
they may have the position and luxury 
that increased wealth will bring. . . . 
The observation of this phase of modern 
life is not in the least for purposes of 
satire or of reform. . . . We are in- 
quiring how fully this conception of life 
is divorced from the desire to learn what 
has been done and said to the end that 
better things may be done and said 
hereafter, in order that we may under- 
[171] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

stand the popular conception of the insig- 
nificant value of literature in human af- 
fairs." Warner then quotes what Plato 
says upon this subject in the Laws, where 
the Athenian stranger remarks that one 
cause of decay of defence in a state is the 
love of wealth, which wholly absorbs men 
and never for a moment allows them to 
think of anything but their private pos- 
sessions. . . . The conclusion of Plato 
is that we ought not to pursue any occu- 
pation to the neglect of that for which 
riches exist. "I mean," he says, "soul 
and body, which without gymnastics and 
without education will never be worth 
anything; and therefore, as we have said 
not once but many times, the care of 
riches should have the last place in our 
thoughts." 

[ 172 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

''The majority of mankind," he con- 
tinues, "reverses this order of interests, 
and therefore it sets Hterature to one side 
as of no practical account in human Hfe. 
More than this, it not only drops it out 
of mind, but it has no conception of its 
influence and power in the very affairs 
from which it seems to be excluded. . . . 
Just as it is that virtue saves the state, if 
it be saved, although the majority do not 
recognise it, and attribute the salvation 
of the state to energy," etc., . . • "so 
it is that in the life of generations of men 
considered from an ethical and not from 
a religious point of view, the most potent 
and lasting influence for a civilisation 
that is worth anything, ... is that 
which I call literature." 

In this sentence we find the keynote of 
[173] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

Charles Dudley Warner's life — ^the rea- 
son why we are led to speak of him and 
remember him as one of the agents toward 
the better, the larger Hfe of oiu* land. 

"Literatm-e," he says again, "must 
have in it something of the enduring and 
the universal. ... In books of 
law, theology, politics, medicine, science, 
travel, adventure, biography, philosophy, 
and fiction there may be passages that 
possess, or the whole contents may pos- 
sess, that quality which comes within our 
meaning of literature. There must be 
an appeal to the universal in the race. 
. . . The subject of a production does 
not always determine the desired quality 
which makes it literature. ... A 
biography may contain all the facts in 

[m] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

regard to a man and his character ar- 
ranged in an orderly and comprehensible 
manner, and yet not be literature; but it 
may be so written, like Plutarch's 'Lives' 
or Defoe's 'Account of Robinson Crusoe,' 
that it is literature and of imperishable 
value as a picture of human life, as a sat- 
isfaction to the want of the human mind 
which is higher than the want of knowl- 
edge. ... It may be weighty and 
profound; it may be light, as light as the 
fall of a leaf or a bird's song on the 
shore; it may be the thought of Plato 
where he discourses of the character neces- 
sary in a perfect state, or of Socrates, 
who, out of the theorem of an absolute 
beauty and goodness, greatness, and the 
like, deduces the immortality of the soul; 
[175] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

or it may be the love song of a Scotch 
ploughman, something ministering to a 
need in hmnan nature higher than a need 
for facts, for knowledge, for wealth." 
Warner had set himself no easy task 
to define why literature not of knowl- 
edge alone, but of a higher power, was 
a force greater than that of physical 
forces. But he never relaxed in his 
noble endeavour to make this truth clear, 
and while he regrets that the natural 
division of occupations should cause a 
want of sympathy between the followers 
of the various pursuits existing in the 
world, and while he recognises the disap- 
pointing fact, occasionally met, of the 
"arrogance of culture," he still makes the 
truth evident that "the production of the 
[176] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

poet is as necessary to universal men as 
the atmosphere. • . • We all know 
it is true, true in our individual conscious- 
ness, that if a man be known as a poet and 
nothing else, if his character is sustained 
by no other achievement than the produc- 
tion of poetry, he suffers in our opinion 
a loss of respect. And this is only recov- 
ered for a man after he is dead and his 
poetry is left alone to speak for his name. 
. . . This popular estimate of the 
poet extends also, possibly in less degree, 
to all the producers of the literature that 
does not concern itself with knowledge. 
It is not our care to inquire further why 
this is so, but to repeat that it is strange 
that it should be so when poetry is, 
and has been at all times, the universal 
[177] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
solace of all peoples who have emerged 
out of barbarism, the one thing not su- 
pernatural, and yet akin to the super- 
- natural, that makes the world, in its hard 
and sordid conditions, tolerable to the 
race. For poetry is not merely the com- 
fort of the refined and the delight of 
the educated; it is the alleviator of pov- 
erty, the pleasure-ground of the igno- 
rant, the bright spot in the most dreary 
pilgrimage. • . . 

"The hard conditions of the lonely New 
England life, with its religious theories 
as sombre as its forests, . • . would 
have been unendurable if they had not 
been touched with the ideal created by 
the poet. There was in creed and pur- 
pose the vitality that creates a state, and, 
[ ^^^ ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

as Menander says, the country which is 
cultivated with difficulty produces brave 
men; but we leave out an important ele- 
ment in the lives of the Pilgrims if we 
overlook the means they had of living 
above their barren circumstances. I do 
not speak only of the culture which many 
of them brought from the universities, of 
the Greek and Roman classics, and what 
unworldly literature they could glean 
from the productive age of Elizabeth 
and James, but of another source, more 
universally resorted to, and more power- 
ful in exciting imagination and emotion, 
and filling the want in human nature of 
which we have spoken. They had the 
Bible, and it was more to them, much 
more, than a book of religion, than a 
[179] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

revelation of religious truth, a rule for 
the conduct of life, or a guide to heaven. 
• . . It opened to them a boundless 
realm of poetry and imagination. . . . 
The Bible is the best illustration of the 
literature of power, for it always con- 
cerns itself with life, it touches it at all 
points. And this is the test of any piece 
of literature— its universal appeal to hu- 
man nature.'' . . . 

Charles Dudley Warner's love for his 
kind, for life, for the varied resources and 
beauty in human nature developing in 
endless and unexpected forms, led him, as 
we have seen, far and wide, but every- 
thing was f ocussed in his central idea of 
the "relation of literature to life." His 
constant study, excepting the few early 
[180] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

years given to the law, was in pondering 
the method of saying what he beheved 
could help the world in the simplest and 
clearest style. "I have learned," he said, 
''that the most effective word-painting, as 
it is called, is the simplest. 
In those moments when we have a clear 
vision of life that which seems to us 
most admirable and desirable is the sim- 
plicity that endears to us the idyl of 
Nausicaa." • . . 

Whatever his labour might be by the 
way, whether for prisons, for the negro, 
for women, for schools, for hospitals, the 
form of labour possible to him was by 
pen and speech. This he followed for 
the aggrandisement of letters. In no 
other way, he believed, can the people be 
[181] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

SO surely guided to higher ends. No uni- 
versity work for the training of news- 
paper men and editors can succeed until 
they have grasped one and all this primal 
idea of literature as the surest means for 
the education of the people. Only hy per- 
fecting the medium can this be achieved. 
The irresistible manner of saying is born 
of character. 

Warner's faith in literature led him to 
be a prop and inciter to young authors. 
Where he could discern real talent and 
character he was ready to become a main- 
stay. Only those shivering upon the 
edge of a plunge into the sea of literary 
life can know what a help he was and 
what happiness his hope in behalf of oth- 
ers gave. His advice was born out of 
[182] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

wide experience. There is a record of 
one of the many cases of his helpfulness, 
where he writes to Sarah Orne Jewett, 
who had confided to him the actual be- 
ginning of a story which he had first sug- 
gested and she had long been planning, 
"The Tory Lover"; "I am not in the least 
alarmed about the story, now that you 
are committed to it by the printing of the 
beginning, only this, that if you let the 
fire slow down to rest for a week or so, 
please do not take up any other work, 
but rest really. Do not let any other 
theme come in to distract your silent 
mulling over the story. Keep your frame 
of mind in it. The stopping to do any lit- 
tle thing will distract you. Hold the story 
always in solution in your mind ready to 
[183] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

be precipitated when your strength per- 
mits. That is to say, even if your fires are 
banked up, keep the story fused in your 
mind," He wrote also to the same friend : 
"The Pointed Firs in your note perfimaed 
the house as soon as the letter was opened, 
and were quite as grateful to me as your 
kind approval. . . . We are greatly 
rejoiced to know that you are getting bet- 
ter. I quite agree with you that being 
sick is fun compared to getting well. I 
want to see you ever so much and talk 
to you about your novel, and explain to 
you a little what I tried to do with Evelyn 
in my own. It seems to me possible to 
educate a child with good literature as 
well as bad; at least I tried the experi- 
ment. Most affectionately yours." 
[184] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

In July, 1900, he wrote to the present 
writer from Hartford: "My dear Friend: 
I have been told that there is to be a little 
clearing out of our house and a temporary 
break-up on the 7th or 9th of August. 
. . • You see this leaves me unprovided 
for, and out in the heat. I can no longer 
walk my five to ten miles a day with my 
dog Sam in the region of Hartford. My 
face neuralgia is slowly improving, but 
I have not much liking for general com- 
pany, in which I should have to explain 
myself. It has been suggested that you 
might like to renew your invitation, and 
take me in for a little at this time, for 
the sake of what I used to be, or what 
you used to think I was. I may also stay 
a little with Woodberry at Beverly. If 
[185] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

S. O. J. is not with you I might run 
up to South Berwick and see her. I 
might call on Howells at Annisquam. 
Perhaps Aldrich is somewhere stranded 
on your coast. It is so long since I have 
seen anybody, that I have quite a long- 
ing for converse with the unfortunate 
class to which I belong. I mean the 
slaves and bond servants of the publish- 



ers." 



Sunday, August 19, 1900, he writes 
from the New Marlboro Inn: "My dear 
Friend: ... It is really a heavenly 
Sunday in the (illegible) of a lovely land 
of high pastures and woods, and the clear- 
est, most inspiring air! You could not 
make a better day if you had the recipe. 
We have been wandering all the morn- 
[186] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

ing over the hills before lunch. . . . 
I reached Great Barrington yesterday 
after four. The distance is only ten 
miles here, but it is mostly up hill, and I 
had two hours and a half in which to 
enjoy the splendid fields and the general 
country sohtude. ... It is one of 
the few open and cheerful and secluded 
places I know." 

September 1st brought his last note to 
the same: ''Dear Friend: It 'looks like' 
your Massachusetts Boards would have 
to run their own career of sentimentalism 
and cant." (This refers to the lack of 
feeling about the necessity for adopting 
proper methods of reforming criminals.) 
"The sort of criminal religion they are 
[187] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

after has about as much fruit as a Judas 
Tree. 

''Well, 'lets' you and S. and I try to 
be good. I mean to go to Plymouth 
September 15th, to a Mayflower meet- 
ing. 

"Yours affectionately, 
"Charles Dudley Warner." 

Each friend to whom he wrote famil- 
iarly must remember and treasure such 
notes as these. As one re-reads them, 
they bring back his voice, his smile, the 
light of his clear eyes. No man could 
have been dearer to his friends, and it 
was from a happy hour with a little group 
of them that he went suddenly and swiftly 
away from this world. There was to be 
. [188] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

in his life no winter of enforced idle- 
ness, no laying down of his armour be- 
fore his life's end. 



[189] 



An editorial of his own newspaper, The 
Hartford Courant^ has come into the 
hands of the writer, just as this brief 
memorial must close. 

THE TWENTIETH OF OCTOBER^ 1903 

"It was on an October 20 — three years 
ago — ^that Mr. Warner went away from 
us. His friends have not even begun to 
forget him; and they never will. As they 
turn the pages of his books, or find them- 
selves in some place dear from old asso- 
ciation, the familiar voice speaks again, 
and again the shrewd, benignant eyes 
look into theirs. 

"His life was a full and helpful and 
[ 190 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

happy life. He went through this world 
with an alert interest in everything to be 
seen in the journey — observing, compre- 
hending, and interpreting. His tastes, 
like his sympathies, were very cathohc. 
He was a good comrade and audience for 
John Burroughs in the woods ; nature was 
a perpetual delight to him, and for his 
pet haunts here in New England he had 
a love that would have endeared him to 
St. Francis, but Dr. Johnson would have 
found him a companion to his liking in a 
ramble down Fleet Street. The cities 
interested him, the go-and-come of the 
streets, the shops, the politics, the talk 
of the clubs, the clamour of the stock ex- 
change. He never wearied of the study 
of men — ^their ambitions, struggles, slips, 
[191] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

and recoveries* Nothing human was dull 
to him, or unimportant. He did what he 
could — and not by any means in his books 
alone — ^to make the world a saner, whole- 
somer world for men, even the most un- 
fortunate of them, to live in. It was said 
by somebody that nothing else in him was 
so remarkable as this all-around interest, 
understanding, and sympathy. But what 
his friends remember most vividly and 
thankfully is his friendliness. 

''Emerson, many years ago, put into 
words his idea and ideal of friendship, as 
follows : 

" 'It is for aid and comfort through all 

the relations and passages of life and 

death. It is fit for serene days, and 

graceful gifts, and country rambles, but 

[192] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

also for rough roads and hard fare, ship- 
wreck, poverty and persecution. It keeps 
company with the saUies of the wit and 
the trances of rehgion. We are to dig- 
nify to each other the daily needs and 
offices of man's life, and embellish it by 
courage, wisdom, and unity/ 

"The friendship of Charles Dudley 
Warner was of that staying, sufficing 
quality. It measured up to the Emerson 
tests." 

Any account of such a newspaper editor 
as Charles Dudley Warner would be 
sadly at fault without a fuller account of 
his stewardship in that direction than it 
has been the writer's power to give un- 
aided; therefore the subjoined letter was 
[193] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

gratefully received from his successor in 
editorship, Mr. Charles Hopkins Clark, 
who came a very young man into the 
Courant office and into Mr. Warner's 
closest friendship: 

"I am very glad to send you a little 
something about Mr. Warner, though I 
am painfully aware that it will be inade- 
quate. One of my great regrets is that 
I did not keep any journal or other 
memorandum to record some at least of 
the innumerable wise and clever sayings 
which came so spontaneously into his 
every-day conversation. The whole room 
seemed to sparkle when he came into it. 

"I worked in one capacity or another 
under him on the Hartford Courant for 
[194] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

about thirty years, and it is mortifying 
not to be able to say more, and more defi- 
nitely, of one so vividly and fondly re- 
membered. Mr. Warner was the best 
all-around newspaper man I ever met. 
He had made his way up from exchange 
editor at $800 a year, and he knew the 
practical side of the work, and he had a 
clear notion of just how each department 
should be conducted and what a news- 
paper should be. His editorial policy, 
often emphasised to his younger asso- 
ciates, was 'Be sure you are right and 
then don't worry. You may be in the 
minority at first, but not for long.' He 
had a cheerful optimism in practice, al- 
though he sometimes talked despondently 
of the drift of things. His sense of news 
[195] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

was keen and sure, 'Why didn't you 
have something in the paper to-day,' he 
asked, 'about that matter we were talk- 
ing of yesterday?' 'Oh,' was the reply, 
'I did not think it would interest people/ 
'It interested us, didn't it?' he went on, 
'and aren't we people? What interests 
us will interest others, and it is what in- 
terests them that people want to read.' 

"He wrote with the utmost ease and 
had the largest fund of general informa- 
tion at hand, and the widest range of in- 
terests, of all the men I have known. He 
was especially recognised in those articles 
that were more or less essaistical and in 
which his delicious humour had a chance 
to play. But he wrote also on occasions 
the most virile and strenuous political ed- 
[196] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

itorials. Often when his partner and fel- 
low-editor. General Hawley, would come 
home after a long absence, people drop- 
ping into the office would say they were 
glad to see 'Hawley's vigorous pen at 
work again,' while, in fact, what they had 
noticed was another of Mr. Warner's 
leaders. His style of writing adapted 
itself to his theme. He did his work and 
then moved along to the next thing and 
did not carry all the time in mind what 
he had done. I recall that once, at my 
urgent request, when Mrs. Stowe was re- 
ported dying, he wrote an editorial about 
her to be published at her death. She ral- 
lied and lived months, perhaps years. 
When finally the article appeared he was 
at the South. On receiving his Courant 
[197] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

he wrote home expressing his hearty ap- 
proval of the editorial, adding that there 
were things in there that he had always 
intended to say when the time came. He 
was quite curious to know who the author 
was. Whenever anything appeared in 
the paper which he particularly liked it 
was his way to find who wrote it and to 
tell him that he liked it and why. He 
was especially considerate of the young 
men and always ready to encourage them. 
His cheery companionship belonged to 
all of us in the office. Long after his 
active work on The Courant ceased, in- 
deed, up to and including the day of his 
death, he came there regularly, ran his 
eye over the papers, and discussed the 
news of the day. His kindly, simple, and 
[198] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

lovable nature put all at ease who came 
in contact with him, and his ready wit, 
his broad views of life, his quick and 
true judgment, not only entertained but 
instructed them. His personality per- 
vaded the whole office. Not only did he 
establish the standard for all who worked 
under him, but he was the standard him- 
self." 

In the November number of Harper's 
Magazine after Mr. Warner's death Mr. 
Howells published in the "Easy Chair" 
the following tribute in token of their 
friendship : 

"Nothing in a man's life can so abso- 
lutely free us concerning him as its end; 
[199] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

and if we then grieve that our praise can 
no longer soothe the dull, cold ear, we 
are safe in knowing that we cannot wound 
it. We are liberated to the wish of see- 
ing him as he was, and we are as far 
from the wish to overpraise his work as 
to censure it. More than ever in that 
solemn, sudden absence we feel the gro- 
tesqueness of insincerity, and could wish 
to speak of it as it would wish to speak 
of itself, if it did not fear being misun- 
derstood. But the friend whom we all 
lost, whether we personally knew him or 
not, in Charles Dudley Warner, was a 
man Httle given to speaking of himself. 
Some Uterary men have the habit, not less 
modestly than those who have it not, of 
talking freely of their work, both in and 
[200] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

out of print; but it would not be easy 
to find in his work any expression of his 
sense of it. No doubt he knew how to 
value it rightly, and he was personally 
present in it in uncommon measure. It 
was his voice speaking all the more di- 
rectly for himself because of the trans- 
parent mask he put on in those little 
humourous studies which first charmed us ; 
it was always his voice we heard in what 
he wrote and it appealed to each of us 
as from the heart of his own personality. 
The true form of his art was at its best 
in the series of essays which preceded his 
fiction. 'My Summer in a Garden/ 
'Backlog Studies/ 'Saunterings/ 'Adi- 
rondack Sketches/ 'Baddeck,. and That 
Sort of Thing' — it is a pleasure to name 
[201] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

them over, and for their old lovers each 
name will have a glimmer of the opales- 
cence which filled the things themselves 
with lovely light. They were of the 
quality which we felt in his fiction, but 
felt not so intimately, and in his effort 
to make it felt intimately there was the 
defect of this fiction. He had not the 
novelist's habit of using experience imag- 
inatively, structurally. He had rather 
the essayist's habit of using it illustra- 
tively, even decoratively, and in a time of 
far greater novelists it was his distinction 
to be the first essayist among the rarest 
few. In one little book of his, which is 
still an essay, he made perhaps his most 
original contribution to literature. It 
would be idle to say that no one else could 
[ 202 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

have written anything Kke 'Being a Boy/ 
but it is certain that no one else had, when 
he conceived of an autobiographic study 
of all boyhood, which should be as true 
to every other man's sense of his own boy- 
hood as it was to the author's, and which 
as it were dramatised the nature of a boy. 
In its sense of character still in the bud 
it has not been equalled, if it ever will be. 
''No one has seen life more kindly and 
wisely. His range was very wide, and 
he wrote with delightful intelligence of 
other lands and peoples, as different from 
one another as they were alien to ours. 
His travels were of the mood which every 
educated American will recognise as hav- 
ing been his own in the period of moral 
expansion following the great war, 
[203] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

when we were beginning to judge the 
Old World without provincial arrogance 
or colonial servility. They are full of 
young pleasure in the Continent and 
Orient which cannot be known to a gen- 
eration grown over-familiar unto both; 
and this mood, which mav make them 
chiefly interesting hereafter to the stu- 
dent of their period, is strongly character- 
istic of the essays which it will establish 
as a part of literature. No man who is 
not thoroughly of his own time can sur- 
vive it, and Charles Dudley Warner was 
conspicuously a New England American 
of the decades between 1870 and 1890, 
which witnessed his greatest literary ac- 
tivity. He first made himself known as 
a gentle humourist of a certain whimsical, 
[204] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

dry quaintness, and then, when we were 
all in love with him for this, we found 
him a humanist of a temper as fine. 
While we were still smiling with him at 
the rich drolling in 'A Fight With a 
Bear' and 'Killing a Trout,' we found our 
eyes wet with the pathos he invoked in 
'Hunting the Deer.' It may be forgot- 
ten how, without acquiring the evil fame 
of a reformer, he went on to self-sacri- 
ficing labours in various philanthropies; 
but what he did for mankind in litera- 
ture, to console or to move it, will not be 
forgotten if any American work of our 
time is to become an English classic. No 
one of our authors except Curtis led so 
much the life of a public man, but War- 
ner was scarcely thought of as a public 
[205] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
man so greatly by virtue of its truest 
expression was his life that of a literary 
man. He was a journalist, an economist, 
a philanthropist; he remains an essayist, 
a humourist, an artist of delicate fibre, of 
rare temperament, of a certain charm, 
impossible not to feel peculiarly his. 
When people were once tried almost be- 
yond endurance by the most exasperat- 
ing of winters, he said, 'Everybody is talk- 
ing about the weather, why doesn't some- 
body do something?' And this, with its 
subtle irony of human futility, is perhaps 
one of the most representative examples 
of his wit, but this humour was an aroma 
which interfused all his thought, and filled 
his page with the constant surprise of its 
presence. He was, in everything he 
[ 206 ] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

wrote, of a high ideal. He thought liter- 
ature worthy of the best he could do ; and 
all that he did was in the interest of those 
more refined good morals which we call 
good manners; it was polite literature. 
His artistic conscience was of one make 
with his ethical conscience, and whether 
he was always aware of it or not, he ad- 
dressed his reader from both. What he 
wrote, that he was; and to praise him as 
one from whose books no one could rise 
with a base or rude thought would be an 
oiFence to his memory, so much was his 
literature a positive counsel of civility, so 
far was it above the poor virtues of omis- 
sion. It remains, and will remain, an 
influence for right behaving through 
right feeling and thinking. No one to 
[207] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 

whom letters are dear could help feeling 
an intimate loss in the sudden passing of 
that fine and clear intelligence; and if it 
was one's fortune to be long associated 
with it, through the same years of aspira- 
tion and endeavour, one must feel some- 
thing of his own life gone out of him 
with it. It is not for such a one to put 
on the prophet and declare his future, and 
it is not the present affair to fix Charles 
Dudley Warner's place in literature. It 
is more useful to ascertain its place in 
him and to realise that whatever the 
beauty and sweetness of his literatures it 
was the fainter and slighter image of the 
beauty and sweetness of his nature." 

Surely no recapitulation of Warner's 
[208] 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 
life could be more perfectly made. By 
one of those singular accidents, as we 
are pleased to call them, the little line of 
books called "Lives of Contemporary 
Men of Letters" was projected shortly 
before his death and his name was one of 
the first proposed to lead the series. Con- 
temporary he ever was and will be until 
all those who have known him are at rest, 
for he was a man as the prophet says, 
"such as man shall be, an hiding place 
from the wind and a covert from the 
tempest." 

THE END 



[209] 



CONTEMPORARY MEN OF LETTERS SERIES 
WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY, EDITOR 



The purpose of this series is to provide brief but compre- 
hensive sketches, biographical and critical, of living writers 
and of those who, though dead, may still properly be re- 
garded as belonging to our time. There is a legitimate 
interest in the lives of our contemporaries that is quite dis- 
tinct from mere personal curiosity. There is also, in spite 
of the obvious limitations of contemporary criticism, a 
justifiable ambition to arrive at some final estimate of the 
literary production of our age in advance of posterity. It 
is to satisfy so far as possible this ambition and this interest 
that the present series is planned. European as well as 
English and American men of letters are included, so as to 
give a complete survey of the intellectual and artistic life of 
an age that is characteristically cosmopolitan. It is also 
often called a decadent age, and it has therefore a varied 
outlook on life. The diverse and often conflicting points of 
view that we thus meet with in modern poets and prose 
writers are all treated intelligently and sympathetically by 
writers especially qualified in every instance, although the 
prevailing temper of the series is idealistic. 



McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO., 
141 East Twenty-fifth Street, New York. 

[OVERl 



IN THE SAME SERIES 

WALTER PATER 
BY FERRIS GREENSLET 

" One of the best things of the sort that we know of." 

New York Evening Sun, 

" A thoroughly sympathetic and penetrating study." 

New York Independent. 

*' A most suggestive and stimulating little volume." 

Kansas City Star and Times. 

•' A piece of solid, genuine criticism." 

Boston Transcripts 

*' The writer has handled his subject with rare skill and 
appreciation." Current Literature. 

'* Performs a service for which the lovers and students of 
Pater will be grateful." Ethical Record. 

*• In a compass of 150 pages the author has given a more 

satisfying portrait and estimate of his subject than other 

critics have given of other authors in 600 pages." 

> Baltimore Sun. 

[over] 



IN THE SAME SERIES 



BRET HARTE 
BY H. W. BOYNTON 



" An admirable piece of condensed biographical writing 
, . . a truthful study. . . . Far and away the best 
(study of Bret Harte) that has yet come to us, and delight- 
ful reading after the mass of uncritical, gushing, senti- 
mental biography." N, Y, Outlook, 

" Very well worth reading, especially by those who want 
a fair view of Harte that shall not make them dislike him." 

The Nation, 



' Will be welcomed by all admirers of the poet." 

The Churchman, 



*'A sane little work, and gives in brief compass just 
those things one wants to know about this famous Hterary 
man, for the treatment is sane and sympathetic." 

Christian Herald, 

[ OVER ] 



IN PREPARATION 

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS AND THE IRISH 
LITERARY REVIVAL 

BY HORATIO SHEAFE KRANS 

AUTHOR OF *' IRISH LIFE IN IRISH FICTION." 



CHARLES ALGERNON SWINBURNE 

By George Edward Woodberry 
Author of *• American Literature," " Life of Hawthorne," " Poems," etc. 



PRESS COMMENTS ON THE SERIES 
" Promises to be a useful as well as a beautiful series. 
. . . The publishers who have put it forth have done 
notably good work in bookmaking of late and these vol- 
umes . . . are fitted to adorn any shelves. 

Providence Journal, 

" In typographical make-up these volumes far excel the 
other literary monographs on the market." 

Philadelphia Press, 

*' The volumes are made up with all the taste which dis- 
tinguishes the books that come from their publisher and 
promise well." The Independent, 

/'Begins not only well but brilliantly. Its future issues 
will receive close attention, thanks to the sterling qualities 
of its first two issues. N, Y. Mail and Express. 

" These handy volumes are just the thing for busy people 
who like to know something about the men of letters of the 
passing generation." Church Standard. 

[ OVER ] 







fiij.^.vv.i'; 






